Can Natural Language Processing Become Natural Language Coaching?

How we teach and learn is undergoing a revolution, due to changes in technology and connectivity. Education may be one of the best application areas for advanced NLP techniques, and NLP researchers have much to contribute to this problem, especially in the areas of learning to write, mastery learning, and peer learning. In this paper I consider what happens when we convert natural language processors into natural language coaches. 1 Why Should You Care, NLP Researcher? There is a revolution in learning underway. Students are taking Massive Open Online Courses as well as online tutorials and paid online courses. Technology and connectivity makes it possible for students to learn from anywhere in the world, at any time, to fit their schedules. And in today’s knowledge-based economy, going to school only in one’s early years is no longer enough; in future most people are going to need continuous, lifelong education. Students are changing too — they expect to interact with information and technology. Fortunately, pedagogical research shows significant benefits of active learning over passive methods. The modern view of teaching means students work actively in class, talk with peers, and are coached more than graded by their instructors. In this new world of education, there is a great need for NLP research to step in and help. I hope in this paper to excite colleagues about the possibilities and suggest a few new ways of looking at them. I do not attempt to cover the field of language and learning comprehensively, nor do I claim there is no work in the field. In fact there is quite a bit, such as a recent special issue on language learning resources (Sharoff et al., 2014), the long running ACL workshops on Building Educational Applications using NLP (Tetreault et al., 2015), and a recent shared task competition on grammatical error detection for second language learners (Ng et al., 2014). But I hope I am casting a few interesting thoughts in this direction for those colleagues who are not focused on this particular topic.