ECAI 2006 Workshop on Language-enabled Educational Technology
August 28th, 2006   Riva del Garda, Italy
Description

Intelligent computer-based educational technology offers the
possibility for large numbers of students to receive individualized
instruction in school and university education as well as on-the-job
training. Incorporating language technology in educational
applications offers the promise of a more natural interaction with the
learner, which many researchers believe will lead to higher levels of
motivation and, ultimately, more effective learning experiences.

Although there are conferences devoted to intelligent educational
technology and natural language processing individually, no major
European conference has brought these strands of research together
explicitly, and it is difficult to gather a critical mass of
researchers with expertise in the range of topics needed to address
the research questions posed in this area . The purpose of this
workshop is to bring researchers working on intelligent learning
environments together with researchers working in natural language
processing to build the community and foster new research in the
area.

We invite researchers developing learning environments who would like
to explore adding language capability to them, researchers in natural
language processing who are or would like to apply their theories or
technology to educational applications, and researchers developing
ontologies, reasoning systems, or knowledge acquisition platforms that
could be exploited by intelligent, individualized instructional
systems.

Topics of interest for the workshop include, but are not strictly
limited to:

  * Interpretation of students' natural language input
  * Generation of individualized natural language feedback
  * Representation and reasoning to support NL-enabled learning
  * systems
  * Integrating natural language into existing educational
  * applications
  * Detecting affect in student utterances or generating affective
    feedback
  * Integration of language with other modalities (e.g., pointing) in
    educational contexts
  * Natural language interaction with open/inspectable learner models
  * Authoring tools for intelligent language enabled learning sysems
  * Evaluating the impact of natural language capabilities in
    educational applications

Organizing committee:

  * Vincent Aleven, Carnegie Mellon University
  * Elisabeth Andre, University of Augsburg
  * Paul Brna, University of Glasgow
  * Charles Callaway, University of Edinburgh
  * Justine Cassell, Northwestern University
  * Barbara Di Eugenio, University of Illinois - Chicago
  * Ivana Kruiff-Korbayova, DFKI
  * Erica Melis, DFKI
  * Johanna Moore, University of Edinburgh
  * Matthew Stone, Rutgers University

Important Dates
April 18, 2006: Workshop paper submission deadline
May 10, 2006: Notification of workshop paper acceptance
May 18, 2006: Early registration deadline
May 24, 2006: Workshop paper camera ready copy submission
Workshop: August 28th, 2006

Corresponding email address:
Charles Callaway ccallawa@inf.ed.ac.uk