Preface
This volume contains the papers presented at the workshop entitled: Building Educational
Applications Using Natural Language Processing.  The workshop was held on May 31, 2003, and
sponsored by the Human Language Technology and North American Chapter of the Association for
Computational Linguistics.
There is an increased use of NLP-based educational applications for both large-scale assessment and
classroom instruction.  This has occurred for two primary reasons.  First, there has been a significant
increase in the availability of computers in schools, from elementary school to the university. Second, there
has been notable development in computer-based educational applications that incorporate advanced
methods in NLP that can be used to evaluate students' work.
Educational applications have been developed across a variety of subject domains in automated
evaluation of free-responses and intelligent tutoring. To date, these two research areas have remained
autonomous. We hope that this workshop will facilitate communication between researchers who work on
all types of instructional applications, for K-12, undergraduate, and graduate school. The workshop is
intended give the research community an opportunity to exchange their ideas with the hope that they may
see novel opportunities for use of NLP tools in educational applications.
This volume contains papers from a variety of diverse applications – both speech and text based. In
many cases, the application is embedded within a larger, complex tutoring system. Three papers deal with
automated evaluation of essay-length texts. An additional two papers describe methods for classifying brief
queries or explanations that are typed into the tutoring system by a student. The value of using a grammar
checker within another text-based second language-learning environment is explored. In another domain,
speech recognition techniques are used to evaluate pronunciation of a second language. Another speech
recognition group compares speech-based to text-based tutoring systems. Finally, a method for
automatically generating test questions is described.
We wish to thank the members of the Program Committee for reviewing the large number of
workshop submissions on a very tight schedule. We would also  like to thank Ed Hovy, Marti Hearst, Mari
Ostendorf, James Allen, Wayne Ward, Jason Eisner and Dragomir Radev for making the workshop
possible. Educational Testing Service should be acknowledged for support of this workshop during all
stages of planning and preparation.  In particular, our ETS colleagues Richard Swartz and Robert Foy
deserve special thanks
Jill Burstein and Claudia Leacock, Educational Testing Service
Program Committee:
Gregory Aist, Research Institute for Advanced Computer Science, NASA
Martin Chodorow, Hunter College, City University of New York
Ron Cole, University of Colorado, Boulder
Barbara Di Eugenio, University of Illinois at Chicago
John Dowding, Research Institute for Advanced Computer Science, NASA
Maxine Eskenazi, Carnegie Mellon University
Art Graesser, University of Memphis
Pamela Jordan, University of Pittsburgh
Karen Kukich, National Science Foundation
Diane Litman, University of Pittsburgh
Daniel Marcu, Information Sciences Institute/University of Southern California
Thomas Morton, University of Pennsylvania
Carolyn Penstein Rose, University of Pittsburgh
Susanne Wolff, Princeton University
Klaus Zechner, Educational Testing Service
