The 5th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications

NAACL-HLT 2010 Workshops


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

Conference: NAACL-HLT 2010

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

Contact person: Joel Tetreault: JTetreaultets.org

Date : June 05, 2010

Venue : Los Angeles, CA, USA

Original CFP



Post-Workshop Information

We would like to thank the authors, our program committee, and workshop attendees for helping put together the 5th NAACL-BEA Workshop. In addition, individual papers and slides, as well as the opening remark slides, can be downloaded from the Workshop Program section below. The papers can also be found in the 2010 Workshop section of the ACL anthology.

Workshop Description

NLP-based applications in educational environments continue to develop at a fast pace. Initial work began as early as the 1960’s on evaluating open-ended assessments, text-based intelligent tutoring systems (ITS), and proofreading tools. These fields continue to progress using innovative NLP techniques – statistical, rule-based, or some combination of the two. More recently, new technologies have made it possible to include speech in both assessment and ITS. From a somewhat different angle, NLP techniques are also being used to generate assessments and tools for curriculum development as well as tools to support assessment development. As a community we are improving existing capabilities, and identifying and generating innovative ways to use NLP in applications for writing, reading, speaking, critical thinking, and assessment development.

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, 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. Last year's workshop (NAACL/HLT 2009) was a banner year with a record number of submissions and attendees. The 2010 workshop (consistent with previous workshops at ACL 1997, NAACL/HLT 2003, ACL 2005, ACL 2008, and NAACL/HLT 2009) will continue to expose the NLP research community to these technologies with the hope that they will continue to identify novel opportunities for the use of NLP techniques and tools in educational applications.

The workshop will include a demo session for accepted papers that involve a system.

Full paper and short paper 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 Readability Assessment for Text Simplification
Sandra Aluisio, Lucia Specia, Caroline Gasperin and Carolina Scarton
[ paper ] [ slides ]
9:40 - 10:05 Enhancing Authentic Web Pages for Language Learners
Detmar Meurers, Ramon Ziai, Luiz Amaral, Adriane Boyd, Aleksandar Dimitrov, Vanessa Metcalf and Niels Ott
[ paper ] [ slides ]
10:05 - 10:30 AutoTutor: A Piece of Cake for Teachers
Marti Quixal, Susanne Preuß, David Garcia-Narbona and Beto Boullosa
[ paper ] [ slides ]
10:30 - 11:00 Break
11:00 - 11:25 Annotating ESL Errors: Challenges and Rewards
Dan Roth and Alla Rozovskaya
[ paper ] [ slides ]
11:25 - 11:50 Search right and thou shalt find ... Using Web Queries for Learner Error Detection
Michael Gamon and Claudia Leacock
[ paper ] [ slides ]
11:50 - 12:10 Rethinking Grammatical Error Annotation and Evaluation with the Amazon Mechanical Turk
Joel Tetreault, Elena Filatova and Martin Chodorow
[ paper ] [ slides ]
12:15 - 1:45 Lunch
1:45 - 2:10 Predicting Cloze Task Quality for Vocabulary Training
Adam Skory and Maxine Eskenazi
[ paper ] [ slides ]
2:10 - 2:35 Generating Quantifiers and Negation to Explain Homework Testing
Jason Perry and Chung-chieh Shan
[ paper ] [ slides ]
2:35 - 3:00 Leveraging Hidden Dialogue State to Select Tutorial Moves
Kristy Boyer, Rob Phillips, Eun Young Ha, Michael Wallis, Mladen Vouk and James Lester
[ paper ] [ slides ]
3:00 - 3:30 Break
3:30 - 3:55 Towards Using Structural Events To Assess Non-native Speech
Lei Chen, Joel Tetreault and Xiaoming Xi
[ paper ] [ slides ]
3:55 - 4:15 A Human-Computer Collaboration Approach to Improve Accuracy of an Automated English Scoring System
Jee Eun Kim and Kong Joo Lee
[ paper ] [ slides ]
4:15 - 4:40 Towards Identifying Unresolved Discussions in Student Online Forums
Jihie Kim, Jia Li and Taehwan Kim
[ paper ] [ slides ]
4:40 - 5:00 Off-Topic Essay Detection using Short Prompt Texts
Annie Louis and Derrick Higgins
[ paper ] [ slides ]
6:30 - Informal Post-Workshop Dinner at the Casa Cocina Y Cantina at 350 South Grand Ave, just a few blocks away from the hotel!
[ directions to Casa Cocina Y Cantina ]
all are invited



Submission Information

Authors are invited to submit a full paper of up to 8 pages in electronic, PDF format (with up to 1 additional page for references). This year, we also invite short papers of up to 4 pages (including 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 2010 NAACL-HLT style sheet for composing your paper: http://naaclhlt2010.isi.edu/authors.html

We will be using the START conference system to manage submissions: https://www.softconf.com/naaclhlt2010/education/

Important Dates

Program Committee

Related Links

Upcoming Conferences