The BEA Workshop is a leading venue for NLP innovation for educational applications. It is one of the largest one-day workshops in the ACL community. The workshop’s continuous growth illustrates an alignment between societal need and technology advances. NLP capabilities now support an array of learning domains, including writing, speaking, reading, science, and mathematics. Within these domains, the community continues to develop and deploy innovative NLP approaches for use in educational settings. In the writing and speech domains, automated writing evaluation (AWE) and speech scoring applications, respectively, are commercially deployed in high-stakes assessment, and instructional contexts (including Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), and K-12 settings). Commercially-deployed plagiarism detection in K-12 and higher education settings is also prevalent. The current educational and assessment landscape in K-12 and higher education fosters a strong interest in technologies that yield analytics to support proficiency measures for complex constructs across learning domains. For writing, there is a focus innovation that supports writing tasks requiring source use, argumentative discourse, and factual content accuracy. For speech, there is an interest in advancing automated scoring to include the evaluation of discourse and content features in responses to spoken assessments.
Top