Newsletter 6

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—” title: “BEA Newsletter #6” author: bea author_profile: true excerpt: “The sixth edition of the BEA Newsletter.” tags: newsletter categories: blog toc: true toc_sticky: true toc_label: “Sections” toc_icon: “cog” —

Hi all, hope you are all doing well! The sixth BEA newsletter contains the following:

  • BEA10 Announcements
  • Upcoming EduNLP Conferences / Workshops
  • EduNLP Resources
  • Recent EduNLP Publications

I’d like to thank our new BEA Newsletter volunteers: Ekaterina Kochmar, Ildiko Pilan and Somwya V. B. for massively assisting in the writing of this newsletter. Thanks!

As always, if you know of any corpora, resources, tools, pubs, conferences, etc. that would be good to have on the newsletter, please let us know and they’ll go in the next one.

Have a great new year and see you in 2015!

Joel

BEA10 Announcements

The dates for the 10th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications, co-located with NAACL-HLT 2015 in Denver, USA, have been set:

  • Submission Deadline: March 08 - 23:59 EST (New York City Time)
  • Notification of Acceptance: March 24
  • Camera-ready Papers Due: April 03
  • Workshop: June 04

Also note that we differ slightly from the NAACL submission guidelines in that long papers are 9 pages and short paper are 5 pages. There will be no additional page for revisions.

As this is the tenth edition of the workshop which is very exciting, we are also soliciting papers which are retrospectives on the field or parts of the field and also forward-looking papers which describe your thoughts on how the field should progress or new directions it should take. We hope you submit some!

Finally, we are also soliciting sponsors for the BEA this year. Contributions will go towards an invited speaker, dinner for students attending the workshop and t-shirts. If you or your institution are interested in becoming a sponsor please email us back at this address. Gold level sponsorship is $250USD, silver level is $100USD.

Upcoming EduNLP Conferences and Workshops

Resources

The following papers were presented at LREC and describe corpora or tools that can be relevant to EduNLP research.

  • Thomas Francois; Nùria Gala; Patrick Watrin; Cédrick Fairon
    FLELex: a graded lexical resource for French foreign learners

  • Guillaume Wisniewski; Natalie Kübler; François Yvon A Corpus of Machine Translation Errors Extracted from Translation Students Exercises

  • Kay Berkling; Johanna Fay; Masood Ghayoomi; Katrin Hein; Rémi Lavalley; Ludwig Linhuber; Sebastian Stüker
    A Database of Freely Written Texts of German School Students for the Purpose of Automatic Spelling Error Classification

  • Camille Fauth; Anne Bonneau; Frank Zimmerer; Juergen Trouvain; Bistra Andreeva; Vincent Colotte; Dominique Fohr; Denis Jouvet; Jeanin Jügler; Yves Laprie; Odile Mella; Bernd Möbius
    Designing a Bilingual Speech Corpus for French and German Language Learners: a Two-Step Process

  • Vidas Daudaravicius
    Language Editing Dataset of Academic Texts

  • Andrea Abel; Aivars Glaznieks; Lionel Nicolas; Egon Stemle
    KoKo: an L1 Learner Corpus for German

  • Wajdi Zaghouani; Behrang Mohit; Nizar Habash; Ossama Obeid; Nadi Tomeh; Alla Rozovskaya; Noura Farra; Sarah Alkuhlani; Kemal Oflazer
    Large Scale Arabic Error Annotation: Guidelines and Framework

  • Ciyang Qing, Ulle Endriss, Raquel Fernandez and Justin Kruger
    Empirical Analysis of Aggregation Methods for Collective Annotation

  • Christian M. Meyer, Margot Mieskes, Christian Stab, and Iryna Gurevych
    DKPro Agreement: An Open-Source Java Library for Measuring Inter-Rater Agreement

  • Ekaterina Kochmar; Ted Briscoe
    Detecting Learner Errors in the Choice of Content Words Using Compositional Distributional Semantics

Recent EduNLP Publications

2014 was yet another banner year for EduNLP publications. We’ve gone through the last six months of conferences and workshops in the ACL Anthology and pulled out the ones that seemed most relevant to the community that you might want to know about. In addition, we’ve done some web searching and found papers outside the Anthology that are also relevant. Enjoy.

EMNLP

This year’s EMNLP had the most educational-oriented papers ever in the conference’s existence, at a whopping eleven. Additionally, there were several education workshops and shared tasks co-located with the conference. Please see below:

  • Christian Stab; Iryna Gurevych
    Identifying Argumentative Discourse Structures in Persuasive Essays

  • Longkai Zhang; Houfeng WANG
    Go Climb a Dependency Tree and Correct the Grammatical Errors

  • Cagil Sonmez; Arzucan Ozgur
    A Graph-based Approach for Contextual Text Normalization

  • Varada Kolhatkar; Graeme Hirst
    Resolving Shell Nouns

  • Raymond Hendy Susanto; Peter Phandi; Hwee Tou Ng
    System Combination for Grammatical Error Correction

  • Eric Morley; Anna Eva Hallin; Brian Roark
    Data Driven Grammatical Error Detection in Transcripts of Children’s Speech

  • Radu Tudor Ionescu; Marius Popescu; Aoife Cahill
    Can characters reveal your native language? A language-independent approach to native language identification

  • Imene Bensalem; Paolo Rosso; Salim Chikhi
    Intrinsic Plagiarism Detection using N-gram Classes

  • Ritwik Banerjee; Song Feng; Jun Seok Kang; Yejin Choi
    Keystroke Patterns as Prosody in Digital Writings: A Case Study with Deceptive Reviews and Essays

  • Octavian Popescu; Ngoc Phuoc An Vo
    Fast and Accurate Misspelling Correction in Large Corpora

  • Shervin Malmasi; Mark Dras
    Language Transfer Hypotheses with Linear SVM Weights

EMNLP Workshops and Shared Tasks

COLING

  • Ciyang Qing, Ulle Endriss, Raquel Fernandez and Justin Kruger
    Empirical Analysis of Aggregation Methods for Collective Annotation

  • Jill Burstein, Swapna Somasundaran and Martin Chodorow
    Finding your “inner-annotator”: An experiment in annotator independence for rating discourse coherence quality in essays

  • Ramon Ziai and Detmar Meurers
    Focus Annotation in Reading Comprehension Data

  • Swapna Somasundaran, Jill Burstein, and Martin Chodorow
    Lexical Chaining for Measuring Discourse Coherence Quality in Test-taker Essays

  • Ekaterina Kochmar; Ted Briscoe
    Detecting Learner Errors in the Choice of Content Words Using Compositional Distributional Semantics

  • Ryo Nagata
    Language Family Relationship Preserved in Non-native English

  • Serhiy Bykh; Detmar Meurers
    Exploring Syntactic Features for Native Language Identification: A Variationist Perspective on Feature Encoding and Ensemble Optimization

  • Martin Potthast; Matthias Hagen; Anna Beyer; Benno Stein
    Improving Cloze Test Performance of Language Learners Using Web N-Grams

  • Lieve De Wachter; Serge Verlinde; Margot D’Hertefelt; Geert Peeters
    How to deal with students’ writing problems? Process-oriented writing support with the digital Writing Aid Dutch

  • Lung-Hao Lee; Liang-Chih Yu; Kuei-Ching Lee; Yuen-Hsien Tseng; Li-Ping Chang; Hsin-Hsi Chen
    A Sentence Judgment System for Grammatical Error Detection

Australasian Language Technology Workshop (ALTA)

There were two papers at this year’s ALTA which had an educational bent:

  • Tudor Groza; Karin Verspoor
    Automated Generation of Test Suites for Error Analysis of Concept Recognition Systems

  • Shervin Malmasi; Mark Dras
    Finnish Native Language Identification

NLP4CALL

A workshop bringing together researchers and other specialists involved in integrating NLP and Speech Technologies in Computer-Assisted Language Learning systems. It took place in Uppsala, Sweden, Nov. 13, 2014. Link to all the papers: [https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W/W14/#3500](https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W/W14/#3500.

Non-ACL

The papers are not in the ACL Anthology.

  • The Elementary School Journal, published by the University of Chicago Press, has a special issue on Understanding Text Complexity and has a collection of articles about the relevance of analysing text complexity for educational standards on what students read.

  • Emran, M. A., & Shaalan, K. (2014). A Survey of Intelligent Language Tutoring Systems. In IEEE International Conference on Advances in Computing, Communications and Informatics (ICACCI), pp. 393-399.

  • Burstein, J., Shore, J., Sabatini, J., Moulder, B., Lentini, J., Biggers, K., & Holtzman, S. (2014). From Teacher Professional Development to the Classroom: How NLP Technology Can Enhance Teachers’ Linguistic Awareness to Support Curriculum Development for English Language Learners. Journal of Educational Computing Research, 51(1), 119-144. [Link]

  • Crossley, S. A., Kyle, K., Allen, L. K., Guo, L., & McNamara, D. S. (2014) Linguistic microfeatures to predict L2 writing proficiency: A case study in Automated Writing Evaluation. The Journal of Writing Assessment. [Link]

Some other suggestions from Google Scholar:

  • Elisa Corino
    Bottom up specialized phraseology in CLIL teaching classes. In Proceedings of KONVENS 2014. [Link]

  • Margarita Alonso Ramos, Marcos Garcıa Salido and Orsolya Vincze
    Towards a collocation writing assistant for learners of Spanish. In Proceedings of KONVENS 2014. [Link]

  • Serge Verlinde
    Turning garbage into a writing assistant. In Proceedings of KONVENS 2014. [Link]

  • Hrvoje Hlebec, Wilfried Hehr and Ronny Jauch
    A lexical database for systematic orthographical teaching and training of German orthography. In Proceedings of KONVENS 2014. [Link]

  • Brendan Flanagan, Chengjiu Yin, Takahiko Suzuki, and Sachio Hirokawa
    Classification of English language learner writing errors using a parallel corpus with SVM. In International Journal of Knowledge and Web Intelligence, 5(1/2014):21-35. [Link]

  • Heshaam Faili, Nava Ehsan, Mortaza Montazery and Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
    Vafa spell-checker for detecting spelling, grammatical, and real-word errors of Persian language. In Lit. Linguist Computing. [Link]

  • Marcos Zampieri, Liling Tan
    Grammatical Error Detection with Limited Training Data: The Case of Chinese. In Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Computers in Education. [Link]

  • Roman Grundkiewicz and Marcin Junczys-Dowmunt
    The WikEd Error Corpus: A Corpus of Corrective Wikipedia Edits and Its Application to Grammatical Error Correction. In Advances in Natural Language Processing, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 8686, pp 478-490. [Link]

  • Carmen López Ferrero, Irene Renau, Rogelio Nazar and Sergi Torner
    Computer-assisted Revision in Spanish Academic Texts: Peer-assessment. In 4th World Conference on Learning Teaching and Educational Leadership (WCLTA-2013). [Link]

  • Anthony Penniston and Eric Harley
    Classification and Generation of Grammatical Errors. In Proceedings of the 2014 International C* Conference on Computer Science & Software Engineering. [Link]

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