2022Q3 Reports: SIGEDU

Membership

SIGEDU has 283 members.

Officers

Officers were elected to serve from 2021 - 2024 as follows: Ekaterina Kochmar, Chair; Andrea Horbach, Secretary; Zheng Yuan, Treasurer. Next elections will be held in 2024.

Board

The SIGEDU Committee is comprised of Ekaterina Kochmar, Andrea Horbach, Zheng Yuan, Jill Burstein, Nitin Madnani, Anais Tack, and Victoria Yaneva. Ronja Laarmann-Quante and Torsten Zesch are continuing members 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 2022, the Seventeenth Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Application (BEA) was held for the first time in a hybrid mode, in Seattle in conjunction with NAACL 2022 and online. BEA 2022 received 66 submissions and hosted two keynotes: by Klinton Bicknell (Duolingo) on ML and NLP for Language Learning at Scale, and by Alexandra Cristea (Durham University) on Aspects of Learning Analytics. In addition, SIGEDU is part of the ambassador paper exchange program within the International Alliance to Advance Learning in the Digital Era (IAALDE), and in 2022, BEA hosted an ambassador talk Taking Transactivity to the Next Level by James Fiacco (Carnegie Mellon University) representing the International Society of the Learning Sciences (ISLS).

The SIG intends to submit a workshop proposal to an ACL-sponsored conference in 2023.

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 workshop attendees 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/.

In addition, the SIG is planning to organize a series of online seminars in 2022–2023 to foster closer ongoing communication and exchange of ideas between the members of the SIGEDU community.

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.