2019Q3 Reports: SIGEDU

Membership

SIGEDU has 164 members.

Officers

Officers were elected to serve from 2018 - 2020 as follows: Jill Burstein, Chair; Helen Yannakoudakis, Treasurer; Ekaterina Kochmar; Secretary

Board

The SIGEDU Committee is comprised of Claudia Leacock, Nitin Madnani, Ildiko Pilan, and Torsten Zesch. Claudia is a co-founder and continuing member of the Organizing Committee for the annual workshop for Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Application (BEA).

Workshop

The SIG is major activity is the organization of the annual workshop. In 2019 the Fourteenth Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Application (BEA) was held in conjunction with ACL in Florence, Italy. BEA 2019 received a record number of submissions (over 80), and hosted a highly successful shared task on grammatical error correction. The SIG intends to submit a workshop proposal to NAACL 2020 or ACL 2020.

Other activities

The SIG is on the Board of the International Alliance to Advance Learning in the Digital Age. Part of this relationships involves selecting a paper from the SIG’s workshop to be presented at another venue associated with other Board members. This is an effort to cross-pollinate across AI in education organizations.

As part of the workshop, organizers selected the papers with the best reviews and highest scores to be presented at BEA. At the workshop, attendees will vote for the best presentation. This paper will be selected to present at http://www.alliancelss.com/. The paper will represent a “best paper” from another SIG. The workshop raised $500 in sponsorship to support meeting attendance to the best presentation paper.

Website and mailing list

We have a working website (https://sig-edu.org) that lists upcoming events of interest to our members and links to BEA proceedings. New members can sign up through a form on the website.