SIGEDU Newsletter – August 2022

4 minute read

Hi all,

We hope you are enjoying the summer.

To keep you updated about the recent news on educational applications, for this newsletter, we’ve collected lists of the EduNLP publications in the recent conferences, job announcements, upcoming calls for papers, among other things:

If you have news, would like to share resources, tools, announce job positions, conference or workshop calls, or publish a blog post on educational applications, please get in touch!

Happy reading,

SIGEDU team

BEA Announcements

Ambassador paper

We are pleased to announce that Educational Multi-Question Generation for Reading Comprehension by Manav Rathod, Tony Tu and Katherine Stasaski was selected as the BEA 2022 ambassador paper. Congratulations to the authors! This paper will be presented at one of the IAALDE conferences next year.

BEA 2023

Looking forward, we are already planning BEA 2023 and we invite proposals for shared tasks to be hosted at the workshop. If you would like to run a shared task at BEA 2023, please get in touch via bea.nlp.workshop@gmail.com.

Calls for Papers

IJAIED Special Issue CFP

Giora Alexandron (Weizmann Institute of Science), Beata Beigman Klebanov (Educational Testing Service), Mamoru Komachi (Tokyo Metropolitan University), and Torsten Zesch (FernUniversität in Hagen) are guest editing a Special Issue (SI) of the International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education (IJAIED) entitled: “Educational NLP for a Multilingual World: Research, Applications, and Challenges”. The SI will have a semi-open call with a mandatory initial extended abstract submission (1000 words max) that shall be submitted to the guest editors ijaied.nlp.mlw@gmail.com by October 15, 2022.

Find the full description and CFP at: https://www.springer.com/journal/40593/updates/23181128

Please do not hesitate to reach out to any of the guest editors if you have any questions.

Thirteenth AAAI Symposium on Educational Advances in Artificial Intelligence (EAAI-23) CFP

Thirteenth AAAI Symposium on Educational Advances in Artificial Intelligence is co-located with AAAI-23 (February 11-12, 2023; Washington, D.C., USA).

The main track invites a broad range of papers on teaching AI and teaching with AI. Submissions may be framed as research papers or as experience reports. Potential topics include:

  • The design of an AI curriculum, course, or module.

  • The development or use of a tool or resource to teach AI.

  • The impact of a pedagogical or mentoring technique on AI students.

Important dates:

  • Abstract deadline: August 31, 2022 at 11:59 PM UTC-12 (anywhere on earth)

  • Paper deadline: September 11, 2022 at 11:59 PM UTC-12 (anywhere on earth)

  • Notification date: November 18, 2022

  • Symposium dates: February 11-12, 2023

More information: https://aaai.org/Conferences/AAAI-23/eaai-23-call/

Workshop on Text Simplification, Accessibility, and Readability (TSAR-2022) CFP

The Text Simplification, Accessibility, and Readability (TSAR) workshop is co-located with EMNLP 2022 (December 7–11, 2022; Abu Dhabi, UAE).

The Text Simplification, Accessibility, and Readability (TSAR) workshop aims at bringing together researchers, developers and industries of assistive technologies, public organizations representatives, and other parties interested in the problem of making information more accessible to all citizens. We will discuss recent trends and developments in the area of automatic text simplification, automatic readability assessment, language resources and evaluation for text simplification, etc.

Important dates:

  • 7 September 2022: Workshop paper submission deadline (Softconf). All submissions have to go through softconf.

  • 9 October 2022: Workshop paper notification deadline

  • 16 October 2022: Workshop paper camera-ready deadline

  • 8 December 2022: Workshop

More information: https://taln.upf.edu/pages/tsar2022-ws/#home

Resources

There were a few new resources released at BEA 2022:

  • A Baseline Readability Model for Cebuano. Joseph Marvin Imperial, Lloyd Lois Antonie Reyes, Michael Antonio Ibanez, Ranz Sapinit and Mohammed Hussien [paper] [resources]

  • A Dependency Treebank of Spoken Second Language English. Kristopher Kyle, Masaki Eguchi, Aaron Miller and Theodore Sither [paper] [resources]

  • Computationally Identifying Funneling and Focusing Questions in Classroom Discourse. Sterling Alic, Dorottya Demszky, Zid Mancenido, Jing Liu, Heather Hill and Dan Jurafsky [paper] [resources]

  • Don’t Drop the Topic - The Role of the Prompt in Argument Identification in Student Writing. Yuning Ding, Marie Bexte and Andrea Horbach [paper] [resources]

  • Educational Multi-Question Generation for Reading Comprehension. Manav Rathod, Tony Tu and Katherine Stasaski [paper] [resources]

  • Educational Tools for Mapuzugun. Cristian Ahumada, Claudio Gutierrez and Antonios Anastasopoulos [paper] [resources]

  • Generation of Synthetic Error Data of Verb Order Errors for Swedish. Judit Casademont Moner and Elena Volodina [paper] [resources]

  • Response Construct Tagging: NLP-Aided Assessment for Engineering Education. Ananya Ganesh, Hugh Scribner, Jasdeep Singh, Katherine Goodman, Jean Hertzberg and Katharina Kann [paper] [resources]

  • Similarity-based Content Scoring - How to Make S-BERT Keep up with BERT. Marie Bexte, Andrea Horbach and Torsten Zesch [paper] [resources]

  • The Specificity and Helpfulness of Peer-to-Peer Feedback in Higher Education. Roman Rietsche, Andrew Caines, Cornelius Schramm, Dominik Pfütze and Paula Buttery [paper] [resources]

  • Towards an open-domain chatbot for language practice. Gladys Tyen, Mark Brenchley, Andrew Caines and Paula Buttery [paper] [resources]

Job Postings

  • Educator (various levels) at Grok Academy [more information]

  • Data Scientist, Educational Assessment at Carnegie Learning, Inc. [more information]

  • Postdoc in Game-Based Learning & Intelligent Tutoring at Carnegie Mellon University [more information]

  • Machine Learning Researcher at Apple Education Team [more information]

  • Postdoc positions at AI-ALOE Research Institute at National AI Research Institute for Adult Learning and Online Education [more information]

  • Postdoc in Educational Data Mining at the University of Sydney. The position is for a postdoctoral fellow to work on Educational Data Mining projects for computer programming education, with an emphasis on hints and feedback generation (to teachers as well as learners). The right candidate must have strong technical skills in data mining and machine learning, as well as a genuine interest in human-in-the-loop approaches. Position is available for 2 years, with a possibility to extend. Please contact Kalina Yacef (kalina.yacef@sydney.edu.au) if you are interested.

  • Program Manager in Learning Analytics at University of Pennsylvania [more information]

EduNLP Publications

A number of conferences have taken place this summer. We’ve collected the EduNLP and EdTech highlights for you.

BEA 2022

https://aclanthology.org/volumes/2022.bea-1/

ACL 2022

https://sig-edu.org/blog/edunlp-at-acl2022/

LREC 2022

https://sig-edu.org/blog/edunlp-at-lrec2022/

NAACL 2022

https://sig-edu.org/blog/edunlp-at-naacl2022/

EDM 2022

https://sig-edu.org/blog/edunlp-at-edm2022/

AIED 2022

https://sig-edu.org/blog/edunlp-at-aied2022/