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                                   PRELIMINARY CALL FOR PAPERS

     The 8th Workshop on the Innovative Use of NLP for Building

                                Educational Applications (BEA8)

                Atlanta, Georgia, USA; June 13 or 14, 2013

                                (co-located with NAACL-HLT)

        http://www.cs.rochester.edu/~tetreaul/naacl-bea8.html

                 Submission Deadline: March 11, 2013 (tentative)

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.

In 2012, the use of NLP in educational contexts took two major
steps forward. First, outside of the computational linguistics
community, the Hewlett Foundation reached out to both the public
and private sectors and sponsored two competitions: one on
automated essay scoring (Automated Student Assessment Prize:
ASAP, Phase 1:http://www.kaggle.com/c/asap-aes), and a second on
short-answer scoring (Phase 2: http://www.kaggle.com/c/asap-sas).
The motivation driving these competitions was to engage the
larger scientific community in this enterprise. The two
competitions were inspired by the Common Core State Initiative
(http://www.corestandards.org/), an influential set of standards
adopted by 45 states in the U.S. The Initiative describes what
K-12 students should be learning with regard to Reading, Writing,
Speaking, Listening, and Media and Technology. Another
breakthrough for educational applications within the
computational linguistics community was the second edition of the
"Helping Our Own" grammatical error detection/correction
competition at last year's BEA workshop - where 14 systems
competed. In 2013, independent of the BEA workshop, there will be
two shared task competitions. This year's CoNLL Shared Task is on
grammatical error correction and there is a SemEval Shared Task
on Student Response Analysis
(http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/semeval-2013/task7/). Both of these
competitions will increase the visibility of the educational
problem space in the NLP community.

In this year's BEA workshop, we are soliciting papers across a
broad range of educational applications, including: intelligent
tutoring, learner cognition, use of corpora, grammatical error
detection, tools for teachers and test developers, and automated
scoring and evaluation of open-ended responses. Since the first
workshop in 1997, "Innovative Use of NLP in Building Educational
Applications" has continued to bring together all NLP subfields
to foster interaction and collaboration among researchers in both
academic institutions and industry. The workshop offers a venue
for researchers to present and discuss their work in these areas.
Each year, we see steady growth in workshop submissions and
attendance, and the research has become more innovative and
advanced. In 2013, we expect that the workshop (consistent with
previous workshops at ACL 1997, NAACL/HLT 2003, ACL 2005, ACL
2008, NAACL HLT 2009, NAACL HLT 2010, ACL 2011, NAACL HLT 2012),
will continue to expose the NLP research community to
technologies that identify novel opportunities for the use of NLP
techniques and tools in educational applications. At NAACL HLT
2012, the workshop coordinated with the HOO shared task for
grammatical error detection, generating a much larger poster
session that was lively and well-attended. In 2013, the workshop
will host the first Native Language Identification Shared Task,
described in detail later in this cfp.

The workshop will solicit both full papers and short papers for
either oral or poster presentation. Given the broad scope of the
workshop, we organize the workshop around three central themes in
the educational infrastructure:

1.            Development of curriculum and assessment (e.g.,
              applications that help teachers develop reading
              materials)

2.            Delivery of curriculum and assessments (e.g.,
              applications where the student receives instruction
              and interacts with the system);

3.            Reporting of assessment outcomes (e.g., automated
              scoring of open-ended responses)

Topics will include, but will not be limited to, the following:

Automated scoring/evaluation for oral and written student
responses

*             Content analysis for scoring/assessment

*             Analysis of the structure of argumentation

*             Grammatical error detection and correction

*             Discourse and stylistic analysis

*             Plagiarism detection

*             Machine translation for assessment, instruction and
              curriculum development

*             Detection of non-literal language (e.g., metaphor)

*             Sentiment analysis

Intelligent Tutoring (IT) that incorporates state-of-the-art NLP
methods

*             Dialogue systems in education

*             Hypothesis formation and testing

*             Multi-modal communication between students and
              computers

*             Generation of tutorial responses

*             Knowledge representation in learning systems

*             Concept visualization in learning systems

Learner cognition

*             Assessment of learners' language and cognitive
              skill levels

*             Systems that detect and adapt to learners'
              cognitive or emotional states

*             Tools for learners with special needs

Use of corpora in educational tools

*             Data mining of learner and other corpora for tool
              building

*             Annotation standards and schemas / annotator
              agreement

Tools and applications for classroom teachers and/or test
developers

*             NLP tools for second and foreign language learners

*             Semantic-based access to instructional materials to
              identify appropriate texts

*             Tools that automatically generate test questions

*             Processing of and access to lecture materials
              across topics and genres

*             Adaptation of instructional text to individual
              learners' grade levels

*             Tools for text-based curriculum development

*             E-learning tools for personalized course content

*             Language-based educational games

Issues concerning the evaluation of NLP-based educational tools

Descriptions of implemented systems

Descriptions and proposals for shared tasks

SUBMISSION INFORMATION

We will be using the NAACL-HLT 2013 Submission Guidelines for the
BEA-8 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. 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.

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 2013 NAACL-HLT style sheet for composing your
paper: http://naacl2013.naacl.org/CFP.aspx (see Format section
for style files).

IMPORTANT DATES

Submission Deadline: March 11 (tentative)

Notification of Acceptance: March 29

Camera-ready papers Due: May 04

Workshop: June 13 or 14

WORKSHOP CHAIRS

Joel Tetreault, ETS, USA (principal contact:
bea8.workshop_(at)_gmail.com)

Jill Burstein, ETS, USA

Claudia Leacock, CTB McGraw-Hill, USA

NATIVE LANGUAGE IDENTIFICATION SHARED TASK

We are pleased to host the first edition of a shared task on
Native Language Identification (NLI). The shared task will be
organized by Joel Tetreault, Aoife Cahill (ETS) and Daniel
Blanchard (ETS). NLI is the task of identifying the native
language (L1) of a writer based solely on a sample of their
writing. The task is typically framed as a classification problem
where the set of L1s is known a priori. Most work has focused on
identifying the native language of writers learning English as a
second language. To date this topic has motivated several ACL and
EMNLP papers, as well as a master's thesis.

Native Language Identification (NLI) can be useful for a number
of applications. In educational settings, NLI can be used to
provide more targeted feedback to language learners about their
errors. It is well known that learners of different languages
make different errors depending on their L1s. A writing tutor
system which can detect the native language of the learner will
be able to tailor the feedback about the error and contrast it
with common properties of the learner's language. In addition,
native language is often used as a feature that goes into
authorship profiling, which is frequently used in forensic
linguistics.

Details on the shared task can be found on the website:
https://sites.google.com/site/nlisharedtask2013/home

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Andrea Abel, EURAC, Italy

Sumit Basu, Microsoft Research, USA

Lee Becker, Avaya Labs, USA

Beata Beigman Klebanov, Educational Testing Service, USA

Delphine Bernhard, Université de Strasbourg, France

Jared Bernstein, Pearson, USA

Kristy Boyer, North Carolina State University, USA

Chris Brew, Educational Testing Service, USA

Ted Briscoe, University of Cambridge, UK

Chris Brockett, MSR, USA

Aoife Cahill, Educational Testing Service, USA

Martin Chodorow, Hunter College, CUNY, USA

Mark Core, USC Institute for Creative Technologies, USA

Daniel Dahlmeier, National University of Singapore, Singapore

Markus Dickinson, Indiana University, USA

Bill Dolan, Microsoft, USA

Myrosia Dzikovska, University of Edinburgh, UK

Keelan Evanini, Educational Testing Service, USA

Michael Flor, Educational Testing Service, USA

Peter Foltz, Pearson Knowledge Technologies, USA

Jennifer Foster, Dublin City University, Ireland

Horacio Franco, SRI, USA

Michael Gamon, Microsoft, USA

Caroline Gasperin, SwiftKey, UK

Kallirroi Georgila, USC Institute for Creative Technologies, USA

Iryna Gurevych, University of Darmstadt, Germany

Kadri Hacioglu, Rossetta Stone, USA

Na-Rae Han, University of Pittsburgh, USA

Trude Heift, Simon Frasier University, Canada

Michael Heilman, Educational Testing Service, USA

Derrick Higgins, Educational Testing Service, USA

Ross Israel, Indiana University, USA

Heng Ji, Queens College, USA

Pamela Jordan, University of Pittsburgh, USA

Ola Knutsson, KTH Nada, Sweden

John Lee, City University of Hong Kong, China

Jackson Liscombe, Nuance Communications, USA

Diane Litman, University of Pittsburgh, USA

Annie Louis, University of Pennsylvania, USA

Xiaofei Lu, Penn State University, USA

Nitin Madnani, Educational Testing Service, USA

Montse Maritxalar, University of the Basque Country, Spain

James Martin, University of Colorado, USA

Aurélien Max, LIMSI-CNRS, France

Detmar Meurers, University of Tübingen, Germany

Lisa Michaud, Merrimack College, USA

Michael Mohler, University of North Texas

Smaranda Muresan, Rutgers University, USA

Ani Nenkova, University of Pennsylvania, USA

Hwee Tou Ng, National University of Singapore, Singapore

Rodney Nielsen, University of North Texas, USA

Ted Pedersen, University of Minnesota, USA

Bryan Pellom, Rossetta Stone, USA

Patti Price, PPRICE Speech and Language Technology, USA

Andrew Rosenberg, Queens College, CUNY, USA

Mihai Rotaru, TextKernel, The Netherlands

Dan Roth, UIUC, USA Alla Rozovskaya, UIUC, USA

Izhak Shafran, Oregon Health & Science University, USA

Serge Sharoff, University of Leeds, UK

Richard Sproat, Google, USA

Svetlana Stenchikova, Columbia University, USA

Helmer Strik, Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands

Joseph Tepperman, Rosetta Stone, USA

Nai-Lung Tsao, National Central University, Taiwan

Monica Ward, Dublin City University, Ireland

Pete Whitelock, Oxford University Press, UK

David Wible, National Central University, Taiwan

Peter Wood, University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada

Klaus Zechner, Educational Testing Service, USA

Torsten Zesch, University of Darmstadt, Germany

ATT00001

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