Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications

Abstract

Since the first workshop in 1997, BEA has become the leading venue for sharing and publishing innovative work that uses NLP to develop educational applications. The consistent interest and growth of the workshop has clear ties to challenges in education. The research presented at the workshop highlights advances in the technology and the maturity of the field of NLP in education. The capabilities serve as a response to educational challenges and are poised to support the needs of a variety of stakeholders, including educators, learners, parents, and administrators.NLP capabilities now support an array of learning domains, including writing, speaking, reading, and mathematics. In the writing and speech domains, automated writing evaluation (AWE) and speech assessment applications, respectively, are commercially deployed in high-stakes assessment and instructional settings, including Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). We also see widelyused commercial applications for plagiarism detection and peer review and explosive growth of mobile applications for game-based applications for instruction and assessment. The current educational and assessment landscape continues to foster a strong interest and high demand that pushes the state of the art in AWE capabilities to expand the analysis of written responses to writing genres other than those traditionally found in standardized assessments, especially writing tasks requiring use of sources and argumentative discourse.Steady growth in the development of NLP-based applications for education has prompted an increased number of workshops that typically focus on a single subfield. In BEA, we make an effort to have papers from many subfields, for example, tools for automated scoring, automated test-item generation, curriculum development, evaluation of text, dialogue, evaluation of genres beyond essays, feedback studies, and grammatical error correction.This year we received a record 62 submissions, and accepted 9 papers as oral presentations and 25 as poster presentation and/or demos, for an overall acceptance rate of 55 percent. Each paper was reviewed by three members of the Program Committee who were believed to be most appropriate for each paper. We continue to have a very strong policy to deal with conflicts of interest. First, we made a concerted effort to not assign papers to reviewers to evaluate if the paper had an author from their institution. Second, with respect to the organizing committee, authors of papers for which there was a conflict of interest recused themselves from the discussions.While the field is growing, we do recognize that there is a core group of institutions and researchers who work in this area. With a higher acceptance rate, we were able to include papers from a wider variety of topics and institutions. The papers accepted were selected on the basis of several factors, including the relevance to a core educational problem space, the novelty of the approach or domain, and the strength of the research. The accepted papers were highly diverse -...