DEADLINE EXTENDED: 16th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA2021)

[Ildiko Pilan]

Deadline EXTENDED: Monday, January 25, 2021, 11:59pm UTC-12

The 16th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA2021)

Online event

Monday, April 19, 2021 or Tuesday, April 20, 2021 (TBD)

(co-located with EACL 2021)

https://sig-edu.org/bea/current

 *Submission Deadline: Monday, January 18 January 25, 2021, 11:59pm UTC-12*

WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION

In its 16^th year, the BEA Workshop continues to be a leading venue for NLP innovation for educational applications, and one of the largest one-day workshops in the ACL community. The workshop’s continuous growth illustrates an alignment between societal need and technological advances. The COVID-19 pandemic brings a necessary expansion for remote learning across the educational space from early primary education through secondary, adult education, and for workforce learning. BEA2021 will have a sub-theme and will welcome research that can support remote and hybrid learning contexts.

 

NLP capabilities now support an array of activities for learning domain knowledge, including writing, speaking, reading, science, and mathematics, and the related intra- (e.g., self-confidence) and inter-personal (e.g., collaboration) domains that support achievement across learning domains. Within these domains, the community continues to develop and deploy innovative NLP approaches for use in educational settings.  In the writing and speech domains, automated writing evaluation (AWE) and speech scoring applications, respectively, are commercially deployed for high-stakes assessments and for formative, instructional assessments in classrooms and online learning contexts. The current educational and assessment landscape in K-12, higher education, and adult learning (in academic and workplace settings) fosters a strong interest in technologies that yield user log data and analytics that support proficiency measures for complex constructs across learning domains. For writing, there is a focus on innovation that supports writing tasks requiring source use, argumentative discourse, and factual content accuracy. For speech, there is an interest in advancing automated scoring to include the evaluation of discourse and content features in responses to spoken assessments. General advances in speech technology have renewed interest in spoken dialog and multimodal systems for instruction and assessment, for instance, for workplace interviews and & simulated teaching environments. The explosive growth of mobile applications for game-based and simulation applications for instruction and assessment is another place where NLP can play a large role, especially in language learning. Due to the immediate need for greater online learning and resources, we expect that NLP technology for education will broaden its reach and expand into the essential personalized learning space with text, speech, and multimodal applications.        

 

The 16th BEA workshop will have oral presentation sessions and a large poster session to maximize the amount of original work presented. The workshop will continue to expose the NLP community to technologies that identify novel opportunities for the use of NLP in education in English, and languages other than English. The workshop will solicit both full and short papers for either oral or poster presentation. We will solicit papers that incorporate NLP methods, including, but not limited to: automated scoring of open-ended textual and spoken responses; game-based instruction and assessment; educational data mining; intelligent tutoring; peer review, grammatical error detection; learner cognition; spoken dialog; multimodal applications; tools for teachers & test developers; and use of corpora. Research that incorporates NLP methods for use with mobile and game-based platforms will be of special interest. We also plan to hold an expert panel to address how NLP technology can support urgent issues in education brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Suggested topics are listed below. We also welcome and urge submission of work in any of the suggested topics that addresses personalized learning. Papers with research that specifically addresses the urgent needs in education due to the pandemic, but also make sense in post-pandemic educational contexts are especially welcome.

Automated scoring/evaluation for written student responses

●        Content analysis for scoring/assessment

●        Grammatical error detection and correction

●        Argumentation, discourse, sentiment, stylistic analysis, & non-literal language

●        Plagiarism detection

●        Non-traditional genres (beyond essays)

●        Interest, motivation, and values in writing tasks

Intelligent Tutoring (IT), Collaborative Learning Environments

●        Educational Data Mining: Collection of user log data from educational applications

●        Game-based learning

●        Multimodal communication (including dialog systems) between students & computers

●        Knowledge representation & 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 & for curriculum development

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

●        Adaptation of instructional text to individual learners’ grade levels

PANEL

In 2021, we will be hosting a virtual 1-hour panel on “New Challenges for Educational Technology in the Time of the Pandemic” that will cover such questions as (1) What areas / subjects / aspects of education will be most affected by the pandemic? (2) How can AI / educational technology help tackle these issues? (3) What long-term consequences will the current situation have on education? We have 2 confirmed panelists so far: Prof. Dr Gaëlle Molinari (Faculty of Psychology, Swiss Distance University Institute) and Prof Carolyn Rosé (Language Technologies Institute and HCI Institute, Carnegie Mellon University).

IMPORTANT DATES

Note: these dates may change. All deadlines are 11.59 pm UTC-12.

●      Paper Submission Deadline: Monday, January 18 January 25, 2021

●      Notification of Acceptance: Thursday, February 18, 2021

●      Camera-ready Papers Due: Monday, March 1, 2021

●      Workshop: Monday, April 19, 2021 or Tuesday, April 20, 2021 (TBD)

SUBMISSION INFORMATION

We will be using the EACL Submission Guidelines for the BEA Workshop this year. Authors are invited to submit a full paper of up to eight (8) pages of content, plus unlimited references; final versions of long papers will be given one additional page of content (up to 9 pages) so that reviewers’ comments can be taken into account. We also invite short papers of up to four (4) pages of content, plus unlimited references. Upon acceptance, short papers will be given five (5) content pages in the proceedings. Authors are encouraged to use this additional page to address reviewers’ comments in their final versions.

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” under “Submission Category” in the START submission page.

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) …”.

We have also included conflict of interest in the submission form. You should mark all potential reviewers who have been authors on the paper, are from the same research group or institution, or who have seen versions of this paper or discussed it with you.

We will be using the START conference system to manage submissions: https://www.softconf.com/eacl2021/bea2021/

DOUBLE SUBMISSION POLICY

We will follow the official ACL double-submission policy. Specifically:

Papers being submitted both to BEA and another conference or workshop must:

●      Note on the title page the other conference or workshop to which they are being submitted.

●      State on the title page that if the authors choose to present their paper at BEA (assuming it was accepted), then the paper will be withdrawn from other conferences and workshops.

 

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

●      Jill Burstein, Educational Testing Service

●      Andrea Horbach, University of Duisburg-Essen

●      Ekaterina Kochmar, University of Cambridge

●      Ronja Laarmann-Quante, University of Duisburg-Essen

●      Claudia Leacock, Grammarly

●      Nitin Madnani, Educational Testing Service

●      Ildikó Pilán, Norwegian Computing Center

●      Helen Yannakoudakis, King’s College London, University of Cambridge

●      Torsten Zesch, University of Duisburg-Essen

 

Workshop contact email address: bea.nlp....@gmail.com

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Tazin Afrin

David Alfter

Jason Angel

Piper Armstrong

Timo Baumann

Kay Berkling

Chris Bryant

Guanliang Chen

Mei-Hua Chen

Leshem Choshen

Mark Core

Scott Crossley

Orphée De Clercq

Kordula De Kuthy

Carrie Demmans Epp

Ann Devitt

Mariano Felice

Michael Flor

Thomas François

Jennifer-Carmen Frey

Michael Gamon

Cyril Goutte

Masato Hagiwara

Jiangang Hao

Marti Hearst

Trude Heift

Heiko Holz

Chung-Chi Huang

Yi-Ting Huang

Radu Tudor Ionescu

Elma Kerz

Fazel Keshtkar

Mamoru Komachi

Ji-Ung Lee

Diane Litman

Zitao Liu

Peter Ljunglöf

Anastassia Loukina

Lieve Macken

Fabiana MacMillan

Montse Maritxalar

James Martin

Ditty Mathew

Sandeep Mathias

Stephen Mayhew

Julie Medero

Detmar Meurers

Natawut Monaikul

Farah Nadeem

Diane Napolitano

Hwee Tou Ng

Huy Nguyen

Ulrike Pado

Long Qin

Mengyang Qiu

Marti Quixal

Taraka Rama

Lakshmi Ramachandran

Hanumant Redkar

Robert Reynolds

Brian Riordan

Alla Rozovskaya

Helmer Strik

Jan Švec

Anaïs Tack

Yuen-Hsien Tseng

Shalaka Vaidya

Sowmya Vajjala

Giulia Venturi

Tatiana Vodolazova

Elena Volodina

Shuting Wang

Zarah Weiss

Michael White

Alistair Willis

Victoria Yaneva

Seid Muhie Yimam

Mingzhi Yu

Zheng Yuan

Klaus Zechner

Fabian Zehner