Final Call for Papers
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, 2021, 11:59pm UTC-12*
WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION
In its 16th 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 are still preliminary and may change. All deadlines are 11.59 pm UTC-12.
Paper Submission Deadline: Monday, January 18, 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