Effective human learning depends on a wide selection of educational materials that align with the learner's current understanding of the topic. While the Internet has revolutionized human learning or education, a substantial resource accessibility barrier still exists. Namely, the excess of online information can make it challenging to navigate and discover high-quality learning materials in a given subject area. In this paper, we propose an automatic pipeline for building an educational resource discovery system for new domains. The pipeline consists of three main steps: resource searching, feature extraction, and resource classification. We first collect frequent queries from a set of seed documents, and search the web with these queries to obtain candidate resources such as lecture slides and introductory blog posts. Then, we process these resources for BERT-based features and meta-features. Next, we train a tree-based classifier to decide whether they are suitable learning materials. The pipeline achieves F1 scores of 0.94 and 0.82 when evaluated on two similar but novel domains. Finally, we demonstrate how this pipeline can benefit two applications: prerequisite chain learning and leading paragraph generation for surveys. We also release a corpus of 39,728 manually labeled web resources and 659 queries from NLP, Computer Vision (CV), and Statistics (STATS).

A Transfer Learning Pipeline for Educational Resource Discovery with Application in Survey Generation

Encoding long sequences in Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a challenging problem. Though recent pretraining language models achieve satisfying performances in many NLP tasks, they are still restricted by a pre-defined maximum length, making them challenging to be extended to longer sequences. So some recent works utilize hierarchies to model long sequences. However, most of them apply sequential models for upper hierarchies, suffering from long dependency issues. In this paper, we alleviate these issues through a graph-based method. We first chunk the sequence with a fixed length to model the sentence-level information. We then leverage graphs to model intra- and cross-sentence correlations with a new attention mechanism. Additionally, due to limited standard benchmarks for long document classification (LDC), we propose a new challenging benchmark, totaling six datasets with up to 53k samples and 4034 average tokens' length. Evaluation shows our model surpasses competitive baselines by 2.6% in F1 score, and 4.8% on the longest sequence dataset. Our method is shown to outperform hierarchical sequential models with better performance and scalability, especially for longer sequences.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/8PaBoicsuHK7beXFunvrtr/embed/polls/4ab13b6c-e178-419b-b1a9-f74d91800c60" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

HiPool: Modeling Long Documents Using Graph Neural Networks

### [Program](https://sig-edu.org/bea/2023#schedule)
The BEA Workshop is a leading venue for NLP innovation in the context of educational applications. It is one of the largest one-day workshops in the ACL community with over 100 registered attendees in the past several years. The growing interest in educational applications and a diverse community of researchers involved resulted in the creation of the Special Interest Group in Educational Applications (SIGEDU) in 2017, which currently has over 300 members.
<br>For more details visit our workshop website:  https://sig-edu.org/bea/current
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W7: The 18th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA)

workshop paper

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
<br>The conference will be held in Toronto, Canada, July 9-14, 2023.<br><br>
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you join us in person or virtually, we sincerely hope everyone has a remarkable conference experience.<br>
This General Chair’s message is where I express my gratitude to the many individuals who have made
enormous contributions to the conference over the past year.

Read [**ACL 2023 General Chair's message**](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WobYM7norbG4dI48s75HfJoD89qgX5a_F-6U8AteLSA/edit?usp=sharing/) in full.

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ACL 2023

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing.

Irene Li

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A Transfer Learning Pipeline for Educational Resource Discovery with Application in Survey Generation

HiPool: Modeling Long Documents Using Graph Neural Networks

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