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

Abstract

ii IntroductionThe field of NLP and education has matured dramatically since the first workshop in 1997, where the primary focus was on grammatical error detection and correction. As a community we have continued to improve existing capabilities and to identify and generate innovative and creative methods. Automated writing evaluation systems are now commercially viable, and are used to score millions of test-taker essays on high-stakes assessments. The educational and assessment landscape, especially in the United States, continues to foster a strong interest and high demand that furthers the state-of-the-art in automated writing evaluation capabilities, expanding the analysis of written responses to writing genres beyond those typicallyfound on standardized assessments. Much of the current demand for creative new educational applications results from the development of the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI). The goal of CCSSI is to ensure college-and workplace-readiness. The CCSSI describes what K-12 students should be learning with regard to reading, writing, speaking, listening, and media and technology.Major advances in speech technology have made it possible to include speech in both assessment and Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS). These advances have made it possible for spoken constructed responses are now being evaluated. Consistent with this, there is also a renewed interest in spoken dialog for instruction and assessment. Relative to continued innovation, the explosive growth of mobile applications has increased interest in game-based assessment.In the past few years, the use of NLP in educational applications gained visibility outside of the Computational Linguistics (CL) community. First, the Hewlett Foundation reached out to public and private sectors by sponsoring two competitions (both inspired by the CCSSI): one for automated essay scoring, and one for scoring of short response items. The motivation driving these competitions was to engage the larger scientific community in this enterprise. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are now also beginning to incorporate automated writing scoring systems to manage the thousands of writing assignments that can be generated in a single MOOC course. Another breakthrough for educational applications within the CL community is the large number of shared task competitions in the last few years. There have been four shared tasks on grammatical error correction, with the most recent edition hosted at CoNLL 2014. In 2013, there was a SemEval Shared Task on Student Response Analysis and one on Native Language Identification (hosted at the 2013 edition of this workshop). All of these competitions increased the visibility of the research space for using NLP to build educational applications.As a community, we continue to improve existing capabilities and to identify and generate innovative ways to use NLP in applications for writing, reading, speaking, critical thinking, curriculum development, and assessment. Steady growth in the development of NLP-b...