2021Q3 Reports: SIGEDU

Membership

SIGEDU has 240 members.

Officers

Officers were elected to serve from 2018 - 2021 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’s major activity is the organization of the annual workshop. In 2021 the Sixteenth Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Application (BEA) was held virtually in conjunction with EACL 2021. BEA 2021 received 44 submissions and hosted an expert panel: “New Challenges for Educational Technology in the Time of the Pandemic”. Panelists included: Gaëlle Molinari (Swiss Distance Universtiy Institute), Carolyn Rosé (Language Technologies Institute and HCI Institute, Carnegie Mellon University), Diane Litman (Learning Research & Development Center and Department of Computer Science, University of Pittsburgh), Burr Settles (Research Director, Duolingo). The SIG intends to submit a workshop proposal to an ACL-sponsored conference in 2022.

Other activities

The SIG is on the Board of the International Alliance to Advance Learning in the Digital Age. Part of this relationship 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. The program committee voted for the best presentation. This paper will be selected to represent the SIG at one of the other venues participating in http://www.alliancelss.com/. Due to COVID-19 and the fact that the BEA workshop was virtual, no sponsorship was solicited for the 2021 workshop.

A SIGEDU Committee

Election is underway to elect officers and board members for a three-year term from Fall 2021 -Fall 2024. The election is expected to begin on July 15, 2021 and be open for two weeks. Nitin Madnani is managing the election technology. SIGEDU membership will receive a link to an electronic voting system where they can enter their votes for all officer and board member roles.

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.