18th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications

toronto

Quick Info
Co-located with ACL 2023
Location Toronto, Canada
Deadline April 24, 2023
Date July 13, 2023
Organizers Ekaterina Kochmar, Jill Burstein, Andrea Horbach, Ronja Laarmann-Quante, Nitin Madnani, Anaïs Tack, Victoria Yaneva, Zheng Yuan, and Torsten Zesch
Contact bea.nlp.workshop@gmail.com

Workshop Description

The BEA Workshop is a leading venue for NLP innovation in the context of educational applications. It is one of the largest one-day workshops in the ACL community with over 100 registered attendees in the past several years. The growing interest in educational applications and a diverse community of researchers involved resulted in the creation of the Special Interest Group in Educational Applications (SIGEDU) in 2017, which currently has over 300 members.

The workshop’s continuing growth highlights the alignment between societal needs and technological advances: for instance, BEA16 in 2021 hosted a panel discussion on New Challenges for Educational Technology in the Time of the Pandemic addressing the pressing issues around COVID19. NLP capabilities can now support an array of learning domains, including writing, speaking, reading, science, and mathematics, as well as the related intra-personal (e.g., self-confidence) and inter-personal (e.g., peer collaboration) skills. Within these areas, the community continues to develop and deploy innovative NLP approaches for use in educational settings. Another breakthrough for educational applications within the CL community is the presence of a number of shared-task competitions organized by the BEA workshop over the past several years, including four shared tasks on grammatical error detection and correction alone. NLP/Education shared tasks have also seen new areas of research, such as the Automated Evaluation of Scientific Writing at BEA11, Native Language Identification at BEA12, Second Language Acquisition Modelling at BEA13, and Complex Word Identification at BEA13. These competitions increased the visibility of, and interest in, our field.

The 18th BEA workshop will follow the format of BEA in 2022 and will be hybrid. We will have three invited talks, a shared task on generation of teacher responses in educational dialogues, oral presentation sessions, and a large poster session to maximize the amount of original work presented. We expect that the workshop will continue to highlight novel technologies and opportunities, including the use of state-of-the-art large language models in educational applications, and challenges around responsible AI for educational NLP, in English as well as other languages. The workshop will solicit both full papers 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 and correction; learner cognition; spoken dialog; multimodal applications; tools for teachers and test developers; and use of corpora. We will solicit papers that incorporate NLP methods, including, but not limited to:

  • automated scoring of open-ended textual and spoken responses;
  • automated scoring/evaluation for written student responses (across multiple genres);
  • game-based instruction and assessment;
  • educational data mining;
  • intelligent tutoring;
  • collaborative learning environments;
  • peer review;
  • grammatical error detection and correction;
  • learner cognition;
  • spoken dialog;
  • multimodal applications;
  • annotation standards and schemas;
  • tools and applications for classroom teachers, learners and/or test developers; and
  • use of corpora in educational tools.

Workshop Program

Invited Talks

The workshop will feature invited talks from Susan Lottridge, Cambium Assessment; Jordana Heller, Textio; and a speaker from one of the IAALDE societies.

Shared Task

The workshop will host a shared task on generation of teacher responses in educational dialogues. Participants will be provided with teacher–student dialogue samples from the Teacher Student Chatroom Corpus (Caines et al., 2020) of real-world teacher–student interactions and will be asked to generate teacher responses using NLP and AI methods. Submissions will be ranked according to automated evaluation metrics, with the top submissions selected for further human evaluation. Given active participation in the previous BEA-hosted shared tasks, we expect to attract around 20 participating teams.

Organizers: Anaïs Tack, KU Leuven; Ekaterina Kochmar, University of Bath; Zheng Yuan, King’s College London; Chris Piech, Stanford University; Andrew Caines, Cambridge University.

Anti-Harassment Policy

SIGEDU adheres to the ACL Anti-Harassment Policy for the BEA workshops. Any participant of the workshop who experiences harassment or hostile behavior may contact any current member of the ACL Executive Committee or contact Priscilla Rasmussen, who is usually available at the registration desk of the conference. Please be assured that if you approach us, your concerns will be kept in strict confidence, and we will consult with you on any actions taken.

Share Code & Data on GitHub

If you are interested in sharing your code and data with the BEA community, we created the #bea-workshop topic on GitHub.

Important Dates

Note: All deadlines are 11:59pm UTC-12 (anywhere on earth).

  • Anonymity Period Begins: Friday, March 24, 2023
  • Submission Deadline: Monday, April 24, 2023
  • Notification of Acceptance: Monday, May 22, 2023
  • Camera-ready Papers Due: Tuesday, May 30, 2023
  • Pre-recorded Videos Due: Monday, June 12, 2023
  • Workshop: Thursday, July 13, 2023

Registration

If you wish to attend the workshop, you must register with the ACL conference once the registration opens. Select BEA from the list of offered workshops. There is no need to have a paper accepted. The workshop is open to anyone who wishes to attend. Importantly, at least one author of each accepted paper must register.

Submission Information

We will be using the ACL Submission Guidelines for the BEA Workshop this year. Authors are invited to submit a long 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 “long 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/acl2023/bea2023/

LaTeX and Word Templates

Paper submissions must use the official ACL style templates, which are available from here. Please follow the paper formatting guidelines general to “*ACL” conferences available here. Authors may not modify these style files or use templates designed for other conferences. Submissions that do not conform to the required styles, including paper size, margin width, and font size restrictions, will be rejected without review.

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

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

Program Committee

  • Rania Abdelghani, INRIA Bordeaux - EvidenceB Paris
  • Tazin Afrin, Educational Testing Services
  • David Alfter, Université catholique de Louvain
  • Erfan Al-Hossami, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
  • Michael Gringo Angelo Bayona, Trinity College Dublin
  • Lee Becker, Pearson
  • Marie Bexte, FernUniversität in Hagen
  • Serge Bibauw, Universidad Central del Ecuador; KU Leuven
  • Daniel Brenner, ETS
  • Dominique Brunato, Institute of Computational Linguistics / CNR (Pisa, Italy)
  • Christopher Bryant, University of Cambridge
  • Dumitru-Clementin Cercel, University Politehnica of Bucharest
  • Li-Hsin Chang, University of Turku
  • Guanliang Chen, Monash University
  • Hyundong Cho, USC ISI
  • Martin Chodorow, The City University of New York
  • Mark Core, University of Southern California
  • Kordula De Kuthy, University of Tübingen
  • Jasper Degraeuwe, Ghent University
  • Carrie Demmans Epp, University of Alberta
  • Yuning Ding, FernUniversität in Hagen
  • Rahul Divekar, ETS
  • George Duenas, Universidad Pedagogica Nacional
  • Mariano Felice, British Council
  • Michael Flor, Educational Testing Service
  • Yo Ehara, Tokyo Gakugei University
  • Ananya Ganesh, University of Colorado Boulder
  • Lingyu Gao, TTIC
  • Samuel González-López, Technological University of Nogales Sonora
  • Tanja Heck, University of Tübingen
  • Nicolas Hernandez, Nantes University - LS2N
  • Chung-Chi Huang, Frostburg State University
  • Yi-Ting Huang, NTUST
  • Joseph Marvin Imperial, University of Bath
  • Radu Tudor Ionescu, University of Bucharest
  • Qinjin Jia, North Carolina State University
  • Richard Johansson, University of Gothenburg
  • Elma Kerz, RWTH Aachen University
  • Mamoru Komachi, Tokyo Metropolitan University
  • Kristopher Kyle, University of Oregon
  • Ji-Ung Lee, UKP Lab, TU Darmstadt, Germany
  • Arun Balajiee Lekshmi Narayanan, University of Pittsburgh
  • Xu Li, Zhejiang University
  • Diane Litman, University of Pittsburgh
  • Yudong Liu, Western Washington University
  • Zhexiong Liu, University of Pittsburgh
  • Zoey Liu, University of Florida
  • Peter Ljunglöf, University of Gothenburg
  • Anastassia Loukina, Grammarly Inc.
  • Gunnar Lund, Grammarly
  • Jakub Macina, ETH Zurich
  • Lieve Macken, Ghent University, Belgium
  • James Martin, University of Colorado Boulder
  • Sandeep Mathias, Presidency University, Bangalore
  • Janet Mee, NBME
  • Detmar Meurers, University of Tübingen
  • Farah Nadeem, UNICEF
  • Ben Naismith, Duolingo
  • Sungjin Nam, ACT Inc.
  • Diane Napolitano, Associated Press
  • Kamel Nebhi, Education First
  • Hwee Tou Ng, National University of Singapore
  • Huy Nguyen, Amazon
  • Kostiantyn Omelianchuk, Grammarly
  • Simon Ostermann, Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz
  • Robert Östling, Department of Linguistics, Stockholm University
  • Ulrike Pado, Hochschule fuer Technik Stuttgart
  • Lis Pereira, Ochanomizu University
  • Reinald Adrian Pugoy, University of the Philippines
  • Long Qin, Alibaba Cloud
  • Mengyang Qiu, University at Buffalo
  • Martí Quixal, University of Tübingen
  • Vipul Raheja, Grammarly
  • Vivi Rantung, Universitas Negeri Manado
  • Arjun Ranesh Rao, Microsoft
  • Manav Rathod, Glean
  • Brian Riordan, ETS
  • Frankie Robertson, University of Jyväskylä
  • Aiala Rosá, Instituto de Computación, Facultad de Ingeniería, Udelar
  • Alla Rozovskaya, Queens College, CUNY
  • Katherine Stasaski, Salesforce Research
  • Helmer Strik, Radboud University
  • Abhijit Suresh, Reddit Inc.
  • Jan Švec, University of West Bohemia
  • Anaïs Tack, KU Leuven, UCLouvain
  • Elaine Uí Dhonnchadha, Trinity College Dublin
  • Alexandra Uitdenbogerd, RMIT
  • Sowmya Vajjala, National Research Council, Canada
  • Giulia Venturi, Institute for Computational Linguistics “A. Zampolli” (CNR-ILC)
  • Carl Vogel, Trinity College Dublin
  • Elena Volodina, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
  • Michael White, The Ohio State University
  • Alistair Willis, The Open University
  • Yiqiao Xu, North Carolina State University
  • Klaus Zechner, ETS
  • Torsten Zesch, FernUniversität in Hagen