Workshop on Latent Semantic Analysis for SIKS-phd-students

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On March 29 and 30, 2007 the First European Workshop on Semantic Analysis in Technology-Enhanced Learning takes place in Heerlen at the Open University of the Netherlands.
As a result of the cooperation between SIKS and the organisers of the workshop, SIKS-phd-students can participate without paying entrancefee. The workshop is part of the advanced components stage of the school's educational program. However, there is a fixed number of places available for SIKS-phd-students at the workshop and applications to participate will be honoured in a first-come first-serve manner.

Deadlines:

January 31th 2007: Abstract submission deadline
February 15th 2007: Notification of acceptance
March 15th 2007: Registration closes
29th & 30th of March: Workshop

A free participation as a SIKS-phd-student is only possible by submitting your application via the conference website. (see below) Please, state your full name, affiliation and inform the local organisation that you are a SIKS-phd-student. Phd-students will receive a notification whether they can participate as soon as possible.
For all further questions regarding SIKS and its educational program, please contact office@siks.nl

Call for papers
1st European Workshop on Latent Semantic Analysis
in Technology-Enhanced Learning
Open University of the Netherlands
Heerlen
The Netherlands
29th & 30th of March 2007

1 Description

Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) has been successfully deployed in various educational applications to enrich learning and teaching with information-technology. The primary goal of the workshop is to bring together experts in the field in order to share knowledge gained within the distributed research about latent semantic analysis in educational applications, in particular from the context of the IST projects Cooper, iCamp, TenCompetence, Cooper and ProLearn. In addition to the presentation of recent advances, the workshop will provide a platform for the formation of special interest groups to stipulate a joint research agenda and stimulate innovation and future developments.

2 Paper submission

Participants who intend to present a talk are invited to submit an abstract via the conference website (http://homer.ou.nl/lsa-workshop07/). The workshop welcomes abstracts for up to 1500 words for the below mentioned topics. Deadline for submitting abstracts is 31st of January 2007. All abstracts will be reviewed by a member of the scientific committee. Accepted abstracts will be distributed to the workshop participants.
After the workshop selected contributions will be asked for a special issue of a journal in the advanced learning technology field.

3 Important Dates

January 31th 2007: Abstract submission deadline
February 15th 2007: Notification of acceptance
March 15th 2007: Registration closes
29th & 30th of March: Workshop

4 Committees

Scientific Committee
Benoit Lemaire (Laboratoire Leibniz-IMAG, Grenoble, France)
Fridolin Wild (Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration, Vienna, Austria)
Gustaf Neumann (Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration, Vienna, Austria)
Jan van Bruggen (Open University of the Netherlands, Heerlen, The Netherlands)
Michael Berry (University of Tennessee, Knoxville, US)
Rob Koper (Open University of the Netherlands, Heerlen, The Netherlands)

Organising Committee
Bas Giesbers (Open University of the Netherlands, Heerlen, The Netherlands)
Marco Kalz (Open University of the Netherlands, Heerlen, The Netherlands)
Fridolin Wild (Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration, Vienna, Austria)

5 Topics

Educational technology applications of LSA, such as:
Automated essay scoring & grading
Summarization & writing assistance

Feedback generation
Tutoring & tutor support
Question answering

Learner modeling
Enriching user profiles
Matchmaking of user profiles
Recommender-systems
Peer finding & community formation

Positioning & Placement of Learners
Selection & sequencing of content

Protocol analysis
Gap analysis
Task analysis

Methodological issues for LSA in Educational Technology, such as:
Corpus composition & preparation (sanitising, filtering, selection, seeding, domain modelling, ...)
Beyond texts: LSA over triples, ...

Optimisation of analysis and queries
Statistical properties

Mixed-methods & -techniques:
Combining LSA with other techniques

Evaluation and Validation

6 Special Interest Groups (SIG)

The workshop wants to stimulate the setting up of special interest groups for research on LSA in education. The following SIGs will be established during the workshop:

Future Lab and Problem Sharing Session:
Shaping a Research agenda for LSA in Education

Evaluation Forum for LSA in TEL:
Joint infrastructure for testing, tuning, and evaluation plus creation of test-suites of re-usable data