Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications

Research in NLP applications for education continues to progress using innovative NLP techniques. New technologies have made it possible to include speech in both assessment and in Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS). NLP techniques are also being used to generate assessments and tools for curriculum development of reading materials, as well as tools to support assessment and test development. As a community, we continue to improve existing capabilities and to identify and generate innovative and creative ways to use NLP in applications for writing, reading, speaking, critical thinking, and assessment. In this workshop, we focus on contributions to core educational problem spaces: development of curriculum and assessment (e.g., applications that help teachers develop reading materials), delivery of curriculum and assessments (e.g., applications where the student receives instruction and interacts with the system), and reporting of assessment outcomes (e.g., automated essay scoring). The need for, and the rapid development of, language-based capabilities have been driven by increased requirements for state and national assessments and a growing population of foreign and second language learners. This is the sixth in a series of workshops on Building NLP Applications for Education that began at NAACL/HLT 2003 (Edmonton), and continued at ACL 2005 (Ann Arbor), ACL/HLT 2008 (Columbus), NAACL/HLT 2009 (Boulder), NAACL/HLT 2010 (Los Angeles), and now ACL/HLT 2011 (Portland). Research in this area continues to grow, and there is ever-increasing interest and practical application that was evidenced this year, again, by the large number of submissions.