BEA Team

BEA Team

BEA Newsletter #10

9 minute read

Hi all, this will be a shorter newsletter. The first news is that the BEA11 has been accepted and will co-locate with NAACL in San Diego this year! The important dates are as follows:

  • Submission Deadline: March 08 - 23:59 EST (New York City Time)
  • Notification of Acceptance: March 25
  • Camera-ready Papers Due: Apr 07
  • Workshop: June 16 or 17

If you could take a quick moment and scroll down to the Program Committee and let us know that if you intended to review that your name is on there and spelling and affiliation are correct? We are basing this off your feedback on the BEA10 survey form, and affiliations change all the time (or umlauts get lost in the conversion). Thank you again for agreeing to review.

The rest of the email contains the following:

  • Changes in BEA organization
  • BEA Information Form (in case you haven’t done it already)
  • Other upcoming NLP/Edu events

As always, if you know of any corpora, resources, tools, pubs, conferences, job postings, etc. that would be good to have on the newsletter, please let us know and they’ll go in the next one (probably going out around the New Year).

Joel & BEA Friends

Changes in BEA Organization

We’re always looking to improve the workshop and the community and your feedback on the last survey (see next item) was very valuable. We have a few initiatives underway that we’d like to tell you about and we’re hoping the fruit will be visible early next year. As part of these initiatives, we’ve folded out four newsletter volunteers, who have done a fantastic job, into the BEA organization.

First, we’re making a BEA website which will house all workshop materials, newsletters, etc. and have its own domain address. Sowmya V. B. and Ekaterina Kochmar are working on putting one together. Second, the overwhelming feedback was that the BEA should develop into an ACL Special Interest Group, and Sowmya and Helen Yannakoudakis are working on a constitution with the original members and then will apply to ACL to be a SIG. The goal is to form an NLP/Educational SIG to further promote the intersection of NLP and Education and possibly build out the workshop into a conference down the road. Additionally, the newsletter is still going on with the help of Ildiko Pilan, Ekaterina, Helen and Sowmya. Finally, so we have more people knowledgeable about the inner workings of pulling off a BEA workshop, Helen will be a fourth member on the BEA11 organizing committee this year.

BEA Information Form

(If you already filled out the form back in the Summer and Fall, feel free to ignore this item)

To date, this mailing list and the one used for reviewing has been manually constructed. As the field has grown considerably over the last few years, it is sometimes hard to keep track of everyone’s affiliations but also research interests, which helps us best match papers with appropriate reviewers. To address this we’ve created a google form where you can submit your information and then it will be saved to a google spreadsheet which the BEA organizers can use for this newsletter but also for the workshop. If you could please take 90 seconds to fill out the form considerably.

If you’ve done this a year or two before, please update this again. We ask a few different questions and of course email addresses, affiliations, interests change. If you know of others who would like to be added to the mailing list, please send them the above link. THANKS!

Upcoming EduNLP Conferences and Workshops

Professor Kay Berkling forwarded the CFP for two upcoming events and a journal.

Language Teaching, Learning and Technology

1ST Call For Papers LTLT 2nd Workshop on Language Teaching, Learning and Technology September 6./7. 2016 https://sites.google.com/site/l1teachingandtechnology/home

The 2nd Workshop on Language Teaching, Learning and Technology is going to take place in San Francisco on September 6 and 7.

  • June 12, 2016: paper submission deadline
  • June 26, 2016: notification of paper acceptance
  • July 10, 2016: camera-ready paper submission deadline
  • September 6/7, 2015 workshop

The LTLT workshop intends to join researchers across countries on the topic of language teaching/learning. Papers submitted here do not have to employ any technology yet. We are looking for contributions from users that may not be aware of all the possibilities that the technologies have to offer to solve educational research problems. What these papers bring to the table are problem statements and data collections that the speech and text processing community may in turn not be aware of. Thus we are looking for symbioses between the two disciplines in research about learning/teaching language. It is important for both areas to get to know each other’s research questions and potential application for technologies.

This goal will be achieved through collocation with workshops that are associated with Interspeech (focusing on technology for automatic processing and synthesis of speech and text) that allows you to meet people with similar interests, share your work and forge new interactions across disciplines. In doing so, we are looking for a broad range of contributions from didactics, psychology and pedagogy from researchers interested in bridging the current gap to automation. Demonstrations as well as samples of data collections and annotations are welcome.

This workshop is endorsed by ISCA and organized by the Special Interest Group for Children (SIG-CHILD) group that has regular WOCCI workshops. Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

  • Data collection, methods, annotation, recognition, analysis, diagnostic, progression of skills, for example in:
    • Handwriting
    • Spoken interaction
    • Story telling
    • Text production
    • Spelling errors
  • Evaluation of L1/L2 teaching methods
  • Teaching L2 Kids in an L1 class environment (many classes have a large number of multilingual children in L1 classrooms whose parents to not speak the L1 language)
  • Issues in majority language learning environments for L1 and L2 learners
  • Models of learning
  • Applications for teaching, self-learning, classroom learning
  • Giving Feedback
  • Technology in the classroom
  • Games for language learning
  • Other analyses and ideas that have to do with language teaching

Workshop on Child Computer Interaction

1st Call For Papers WOCCI 2016 5th Workshop on Child Computer Interaction September 6./7. 2016 http://www.wocci.org

The 5th Workshop on Child Computer Interaction (WOCCI 2016) will be held in San Francisco on 6-7th of September, 2016. The Workshop is a satellite event of the 17th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (INTERSPEECH 2016), which will take place in the same city September 8-12, 2016. WOCCI 2016 will be held at the offices of Educational Testing Services (ETS).

This workshop aims to join researchers and practitioners from universities and industry working in all aspects of child-machine interaction including computer, robotics and multi-modal interfaces. Children are special both at the acoustic/linguistic level as well as the interaction level. The Workshop provides a unique opportunity for bringing together different research communities from cognitive science, robotics, speech processing, linguistics as well as applied areas such as medical and educational technologies. Various state-of-the-art components can be presented here as key components for the next generation of child-centered computer interaction. Technological advances are increasingly necessary in a world where education and health pose growing challenges to the core wellbeing of our societies. Noticeable examples are remedial treatments for children with or without disabilities and capabilities for providing individualized attention. The Workshop will serve as a venue for presenting recent advancements in core technologies as well as experimental systems and prototypes.

Papers are solicited on any technical areas relevant to the workshop. The technical scope of the workshop includes, but it is not limited to:

  • Speech Interfaces: acoustic and linguistic analysis of children’s speech, discourse analysis of spoken language in child machine interaction, age-dependent characteristics of spoken language, automatic speech recognition for children and spoken dialogue systems
  • Multi-modality and Robotics: multi-modal child machine interaction, multi-modal input and output interfaces, including robotic interfaces, intrusive, non-intrusive devices for environmental data processing, pen or gesture/visual interfaces
  • User Modelling: user modelling and adaptation, usability studies accounting for age preferences in childmachine interaction
  • Cognitive Models: internal learning models, personality types, user-centred and participatory design
  • Application Areas: training systems, educational software, gaming interfaces, medical conditions and diagnostic tools

The technical committee will select papers for oral/poster presentation.

CSL Special Issue on Language and Interaction Technologies for Children

The purpose of this special edition of CSL is to publish the results of new research in the area of speech, text and language technology applied specifically to children’s voices, texts and applications. Children are different to adults both at the acoustic and linguistic level as well as in the way that they interact with people and technology. To address these issues appropriately, it is necessary to work across many disciplines, including cognitive science, robotics, speech processing, phonetics and linguistics, health and education.

Linguistic characteristics of children’s speech are widely different from those of adults. This is manifested in their interactions, their writings and their speech. The processing of queries, texts and spoken interactions therefore opens challenging research issues on how to develop effective interaction, language, pronunciation and acoustic models for reliable processing of children’s input. The behavior of children interacting with a computer or a mobile device is also different from that of adults. When using a conversational interface for example, children have a different language strategy for initiating and guiding conversational exchanges, and may adopt different linguistic registers than adults. The aim of the special edition is to provide a platform for collecting mature research in this area.

Technical Scope

The special issue will focus on how children use text and speech in all aspects of communication, including human-human and human-computer interaction. We invite the submission of original, unpublished papers on topics including but not limited to:

  • Speech Interfaces: acoustic and linguistic analysis of children’s speech, discourse analysis of spoken language inchild-machine interaction, age-dependent characteristics of spoken language, automatic speech recognition for children and spoken dialogue systems
  • Text Analysis: Analysis of complexity and accuracy in children’s text productions, understanding progression and development in orthography and syntax skills, use of vocabulary and registers or handwriting skills.
  • Multi-modality, Robotics and Avatars: multi-modal child-machine interaction, multi-modal input and output interfaces, including robotic interfaces, intrusive, non-intrusive devices for environmental data processing, pen or gesture/visual interfaces
  • User Modeling: user modeling and adaptation, usability studies accounting for age preferences in child-machine interaction
  • Cognitive Models: internal learning models, personality types, user-centered and participatory design
  • Application Areas: training systems, educational software, gaming interfaces, medical conditions, such as autism or speech disorders, diagnostic tools and (speech) therapy

Important Dates

  • Paper submission deadline: March 1, 2016
  • Target publication date: January 1, 2017

Instructions for Submission The submission website for this journal is located here. To ensure that all manuscripts are correctly identified for inclusion into the special issue, it is important that authors select “SI:Child Language Processing” when they reach the “Article Type Name” step in the submission.

Guest Editors

  • Berkling Kay, Cooperative State University, Berkling@dhbw-karlsruhe.de
  • Russell Martin, University of Birmingham, m.j.russell@bham.ac.uk
  • Evanini Keelan, ETS, kevanini@ets.org