The 6th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications

ACL-HLT 2011 Workshops


Workshop Description - Workshop Program - Submission Info - Important Dates - Program Committee - Related Links

Conference: ACL-HLT 2011

Organization: Joel Tetreault (Educational Testing Service), Jill Burstein (Educational Testing Service), Claudia Leacock (Butler Hill Group)

Contact person: Joel Tetreault: JTetreaultets.org

Date : June 24, 2011

Venue : Portland, OR, USA


Workshop Description

Research in NLP applications for education continues to progress using innovative NLP techniques - statistical, rule-based, or most commonly, a combination of the two. New technologies have made it possible to include speech in both assessment and Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS). NLP techniques are also being used to generate assessments and tools for curriculum development of reading materials, as well as tools to support assessment and test development. As a community we continue to improve existing capabilities and to identify and generate innovative and creative ways to use NLP in applications for writing, reading, speaking, critical thinking, and assessment.

NLP-based educational applications continue to develop in order to serve the learning and assessment needs of students, teachers, schools, and testing organizations. Contributions to the educational problem space include: development of curriculum and assessment (e.g., applications that help teachers develop reading materials), delivery of curriculum and assessments (e.g., applications where the student receives instruction and interacts with the system), and reporting of assessment outcomes (e.g., automated essay scoring). The need for, and the rapid development of, language-based capabilities have been driven by increased requirements for state and national assessments, and a growing population of foreign and second language learners.

In the past ten years, the steady growth in the area of NLP-based applications for education has prompted an increased number of workshops which typically focus on one specific aspect of NLP-based educational applications. In this workshop, we solicit papers from all subfields. The workshops on the "Innovative Use of NLP in Building Educational Applications" have continued to bring together all these subfields to foster interaction and collaboration among researchers in both academic institutions and industry. This workshop offers a venue for researchers to present and discuss work in this area. Each year, workshop submission numbers and attendance grows, and the state of the research becomes more innovative and advanced. In the past two years, at NAACL/HLT 2009 and 2010, the workshop received a record number of submissions and attendees. The 2011 workshop (consistent with previous workshops at ACL 1997, NAACL/HLT 2003, ACL 2005, ACL 2008, NAACL/HLT 2009, and NAACL/HLT 2010) will continue to expose the NLP research community to these technologies as they continue to identify novel opportunities for the use of NLP techniques and tools in educational applications.

The workshop will solicit both full papers (8 pages plus 2 pages for references) and short papers (4 pages plus 2 pages for references) for either oral or poster presentation. We will give special attention to research that has taken into serious consideration the educational problem space into which their work fits. Topics will include, but will not be limited to, the following:



Workshop Program

8:45 - 9:00 Loading in of Presentations
Speakers, please bring your presentations so we can preload them before the workshop.
9:00 - 9:15 Opening Remarks
[ slides ]
9:15 - 9:40 Automatic Question Generation using Discourse Cues
Manish Agarwal, Rakshit Shah and Prashanth Mannem
9:40 - 10:05 Understanding Differences in Perceived Peer-Review Helpfulness using Natural Language Processing
Wenting Xiong and Diane J. Litman
10:05 - 10:30 Generating Varied Narrative Probability Exercises
Mariët Theune, Roan Boer Rookhuiszen, Rieks op den Akker and Hanneke Geerlings
10:30 - 11:00 Break
11:00 - 11:25 Elicited Imitation for Prediction of OPI Test Scores
Kevin Cook, Jeremiah McGhee and Deryle Lonsdale
11:25 - 11:50 Detecting Structural Events for Assessing Non-Native Speech
Lei Chen and Su-Youn Yoon
11:50 - 12:15 Performance of Automated Scoring for Children's Oral Reading
Ryan Downey, David Rubin, Jian Cheng and Jared Bernstein
12:15 - 1:45 Lunch
1:45 - 3:30 Poster Session
Readability Annotation: Replacing the Expert by the Crowd
Philip van Oosten and Véronique Hoste
Using Semantic Distance to Automatically Determine Transfer Course Equivalencies
Beibei Yang and Jesse M. Heines
Automatic Gap-fill Question Generation from Text Books
Manish Agarwal and Prashanth Mannem
Non-scorable Response Detection for Automated Speaking Proficiency Assessment
Su-Youn Yoon, Keelan Evanini and Klaus Zechner
GRASP: Grammar- and Syntax-based Pattern-Finder in CALL
Chung-chi Huang, Mei-hua Chen, Shih-ting Huang and Jason S. Chang
Non-English Response Detection Method for Automated Proficiency Scoring System
Su-Youn Yoon and Derrick Higgins
Effect of Word Complexity on L2 Vocabulary Learning
Kevin Dela Rosa and Maxine Eskenazi
Improving a Machine Learning System for Korean Particle Error Detection
Markus Dickinson, Ross Israel and Sun-Hee Lee
Exploring Effective Dialogue Act Sequences in One-on-one Computer Science Tutoring Dialogues
Lin Chen, Barbara Di Eugenio, Davide Fossati, Stellan Ohlsson and David Cosejo
Measuring Language Development in Early Childhood Education: A Case Study of Grammar Checking in Child Language Transcripts
Khairun-nisa Hassanali and Yang Liu
Generating Concept Map Exercises from Textbooks
Andrew Olney, Whitney Cade and Claire Williams
Story Assembly in a Dyslexia Fluency Tutor
Arthur Ward and Rebecca Crowley
Predicting Change in Student Motivation by Measuring Cohesion between Tutor and Student
Arthur Ward, Diane Litman and Maxine Eskenazi
Generating Example Contexts to Illustrate a Target Word Sense
Jack Mostow and Weisi Duan
3:00 - 3:30 Break
4:00 - 4:25 Bilingual Random Walk Models for Automated Grammar Correction of ESL Author-Produced Text
Randy West, Y. Albert Park and Roger Levy
4:25 - 4:50 High-Order Sequence Modeling for Language Learner Error Detection
Michael Gamon
6:30 - Post-workshop dinner at Al-Amri Restaurant on 223 SW Stark St., Portland
[ directions to Al-Amri from Main Conference Hotel ]
all are invited



Submission Information

We will be using the ACL-HLT 2011 Submission Guidelines for the BEA-6 Workshop this year. Authors are invited to submit a full paper of up to 8 pages in electronic, PDF format (with up to 2 additional pages for references). This year, we also invite short papers of up to 4 pages (including 2 additional pages for references). Papers which describe systems are also invited to give a demo of their system. If you would like to present a demo in addition to presenting the paper, please make sure to select either "full paper + demo" or "short paper + demo" in the START submission process.

Previously published papers cannot be accepted. The submissions will be reviewed by the program committee. As reviewing will be blind, please ensure that papers are anonymous. Self-references that reveal the author's identity, e.g., "We previously showed (Smith, 1991) ...", should be avoided. Instead, use citations such as "Smith previously showed (Smith, 1991) ...".

Please use the 2011 ACL-HLT style sheet for composing your paper: http://www.acl2011.org/call.shtml#submission

We will be using the START conference system to manage submissions: https://www.softconf.com/acl2011/education/

Important Dates

Program Committee

Related Links