WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION

The BEA Workshop is a leading venue for NLP innovation in the context of educational applications. It is one of the largest one-day workshops in the ACL community with over 100 registered attendees in the past several years. The growing interest in educational applications and a diverse community of researchers involved resulted in the creation of the Special Interest Group in Educational Applications (SIGEDU) in 2017, which currently has over 370 members.

The 19th BEA workshop will have a keynote by Alla Rozovskaya (Queens College, CUNY), an invited paper presentation by a member of one of the educational societies from the International Alliance to Advance Learning in the Digital Era (IAALDE), oral presentation sessions, and a large poster session to maximize the amount of original work presented. This year, the workshop is also hosting two shared tasks: on Automated Prediction of Item Difficulty and Item Response Time and on Multilingual Lexical Simplification. We expect that the workshop will continue to highlight novel technologies and opportunities for educational NLP in English as well as other languages. The workshop will solicit long, short and demo papers for either oral or poster presentation.

We will solicit papers that incorporate NLP methods, including, but not limited to:

• use of LLMs and generative AI in educational contexts

• automated scoring of open-ended textual and spoken responses;

• automated scoring/evaluation for written student responses (across multiple genres);

• game-based instruction and assessment;

• educational data mining;

• intelligent tutoring;

• collaborative learning environments;

• peer review;

• grammatical error detection and correction;

• learner cognition;

• spoken dialog;

• multimodal applications;

• annotation standards and schemas;

• tools and applications for classroom teachers, learners and/or test developers; and

• use of corpora in educational tools.

INVITED TALKS

The workshop will feature a keynote by Alla Rozovskaya (Queens College, CUNY) and an invited talk by a speaker from one of the IAALDE societies.

IMPORTANT DATES

All deadlines are 11.59 pm UTC-12 (anywhere on earth).

• Submission Deadline: Sunday, March 10, 2024
  

• Notification of Acceptance: Sunday, April 14, 2024

• Camera-ready Papers Due: Wednesday, April 24, 2024

• Workshop: Thursday, June 20 or Friday, June 21, 2024 (TBD)

SUBMISSION INFORMATION

We will be using the ACL Submission Guidelines for the BEA Workshop this year. Authors are invited to submit a long paper of up to eight (8) pages of content, plus unlimited references; final versions of long papers will be given one additional page of content (up to 9 pages) so that reviewers’ comments can be taken into account. We also invite short papers of up to four (4) pages of content, plus unlimited references. Upon acceptance, short papers will be given five (5) content pages in the proceedings. Authors are encouraged to use this additional page to address reviewers’ comments in their final versions. We generally follow ACL submission guidelines and will require that all submitted papers should include a dedicated "Limitations" section, which does not count toward the page limit. 

Papers which describe systems are also invited to give a demo of their system. If you would like to present a demo in addition to presenting the paper, please make sure to select either “long paper + demo” or “short paper + demo” under “Submission Category” in the START submission page. 

Previously published papers cannot be accepted. The submissions will be reviewed by the program committee. As reviewing will be blind, please ensure that papers are anonymous. Self-references that reveal the author’s identity, e.g., “We previously showed (Smith, 1991) …”, should be avoided. Instead, use citations such as “Smith previously showed (Smith, 1991) …”.

We have also included conflict of interest in the submission form. You should mark all potential reviewers who have been authors on the paper, are from the same research group or institution, or who have seen versions of this paper or discussed it with you.

We will be using the START conference system to manage submissions: https://softconf.com/naacl2024/BEA2024

DOUBLE SUBMISSION POLICY

We will follow the official ACL double-submission policy. Specifically:

Papers being submitted both to BEA and another conference or workshop must:

●       Note on the title page the other conference or workshop to which they are being submitted.

●       State on the title page that if the authors choose to present their paper at BEA (assuming it was accepted), then the paper will be withdrawn from other conferences and workshops.

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

• Ekaterina Kochmar, MBZUAI

• Marie Bexte, FernUniversität in Hagen

• Jill Burstein, Duolingo

• Andrea Horbach, FernUniversität in Hagen

• Ronja Laarmann-Quante, Ruhr University Bochum

• Anaïs Tack, KU Leuven

• Victoria Yaneva, National Board of Medical Examiners

• Zheng Yuan, King’s College London 

Workshop contact email address: bea.nlp.workshop@gmail.com

PROGRAM COMMITTEE