About Me

I am a Managing Principal Research Scientist at Educational Testing Service in Princeton, New Jersey. My research interests span computer science, education,  and linguistics, including natural language processing, automated essay scoring and evaluation, educational technology, discourse and sentiment analysis, education policy, English language learning, and writing research.. The intersection of my interests has led to two of my inventions: E-rater®, an automated essay evaluation application, and Language MuseSM, an instructional authoring tool for teachers of English learners.  I co-organize this yearly workshop (usually at NAACL or ACL): Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications with Joel Tetreault and Claudia Leacock.  

I really love building and managing system development from the early idea through product implementation phases. Working with users is one of my favorite aspects of system design. Over the past few years, I have spent a lot of time talking with K-12 teachers. Lately, I spend a lot of time reading about the Common Core State Standards Initiative to inform my thinking about building new systems that support teaching and learning.  I think that Understanding Language is a great initiative with a great group of people that illustrates the critical role of language in the Common Core Standards, especially with regard to English learners, and addresses important policy issues about equity in education.

Grant Awards

Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, Education Technology Program, Grant Award #R305A100105, Goal #2: A Technology-Rich Teacher Professional Development Intervention that Supports Content-Based Curriculum Development for English Language Learners, $1,499,000, Principal Investigator. (March 2010  - March 2014)

• Beigman Klebanov, B., Burstein, J., and Madnani, N. (in press). Sentiment Profiles of Multi-Word Expressions in Test-Taker Essays: The Case of Noun-Noun Compounds. Accepted to ACM Transactions for Speech and Language Processing.
• Burstein, J., Sabatini, J., & Shore, J. (in press). In Ruslan Mitkov (Ed.), Developing NLP Applications for Educational Problem Spaces, Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press
• Beigman-Klebanov, B., Madnani, N, Burstein, J. (2013). Using pivot-based paraphrasing and sentiment profiles to improve a subjectivity lexicon for essay data. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics.
• Burstein, J., Sabatini, J., Shore, J., Moulder, B., and Lentini, J. (2013). A User Study: Technology to Increase Teachers’ Linguistic Awareness to Improve Instructional Language Support for English Language Learners. In Proceedings of  the Workshop for Improving Textual Accessibility  in conjunction with the Annual Meeting of the North American Association for Computational Linguistics, Atlanta, Georgia,  June 14, 2013
• Burstein, J., Tetreault, J., and Chodorow, M. (2013). Holistic Annotation of Discourse Coherence Quality in Noisy Essay Writing. In the Special issue of Dialogue and Discourse on: Beyond semantics: the challenges of annotating pragmatic and discourse phenomena (Eds.  S. Dipper, H.  Zinsmeister, and B. Webber).
  
• Burstein, J., Tetreault, J., & Madnani, N. (2013). The E-rater® Automated Essay Scoring System. In Shermis, M.D., & Burstein, J. (Eds.), Handbook of Automated Essay Scoring: Current Applications and Future Directions. New York: Routledge.
• Burstein, J., Tetreault, J., Chodorow, M.,Blanchard, D., & Andreyev, S. (2013). Automated Evaluation of Discourse Coherence Quality in Essay Writing. In Shermis, M.D., & Burstein, J. (Eds.),  Handbook of Automated Essay Scoring: Current Applications and Future Directions. New York: Routledge.
• Burstein, J., Beigman-Klebanov, B., Madnani, N., & Faulkner, A.  Sentiment Analysis Detection for Essay Evaluation. (2013). In Shermis, M.D., & Burstein, J. (Eds.),  Handbook of Automated Essay Scoring: Current Applications and Future Directions. New York: Routledge.
• Madnani, N., Burstein, J., Sabatini, J., and O’Reilly, T. (2013). Automated Scoring of a Summary-Writing Task Designed to Measure Reading Comprehension. In Proceedings of the North American Association for Computational Linguistics Eighth Workshop Using Innovative NLP for Building Educational Applications,  Atlanta, Georgia, June 13, 2013.
• Burstein, J., Shore, J., Sabatini, J., Moulder, B., Holtzman, S., & Pedersen, T. (2012). The Language Muse system: Linguistically focused instructional authoring ETS RR-12-21. Princeton, NJ: ETS. 
• Burstein, J., Flor, M., Tetreault, J., Madnani, N., & Holtzman, S. (2012). Examining linguistic characteristics of paraphrase in a test-taker summaries. ETS RR-12-18. Princeton, NJ: ETS.
• Burstein, J. (2012).  Fostering Best Practices in Writing Instruction and Assessment with E-rater®. In “Writing Assessment in the 21st Century—Essays in Honor of Edward M. White, Norbert Elliott and Les Perelman (Eds.). 
• Beigman-Klebanov, B., Burstein, J., Madnani, N., Faulkner, A., and Tetreault, J. (2012). Building Subjectivity Lexicon(s) From Scratch For Essay Data. In Alexander Gelbulkh (Ed.), Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Berlin: Springer-Verlag.
• Burstein, J. (2012). Automated Essay Scoring and Evaluation.  In Carol Chapelle (Ed.)., The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics. Wiley Blackwell. Marlden, MA.
• Burstein, J., Tetreault, J. and Andreyev, S. (2010). Using Entity-Based Features to Model Coherence in Student Essays. Proceedings of the HLT/NAACL Annual Meeting, Los Angeles, June 2010.
• Shermis, M. D., Burstein, J., Higgins, D., & Zechner, K. (2010). Automated essay scoring: Writing assessment and instruction. In E. Baker, B. McGaw & N. S. Petersen (Eds.), International Encyclopedia of Education (Vol. 4, pp. 20-26). Oxford, UK: Elsevier.
• Burstein, J., Shore, J., Sabatini, J., Lee, Y., & Ventura, M. (2007). The automated text adaptation tool. In Demo Proceedings of the the annual conference of the North American chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL-HLT 2007), Rochester, NY.
• Attali, Y., & Burstein, J. (2006). Automated essay scoring with e-rater v.2.0. Journal of Technology, Learning, and Assessment, 4(3).
• Higgins, D., Burstein, J., and Attali, Y. (2006).  Identifying Off-Topic Student Essays without Topic-Specific Training Data.  In J. Burstein and C. Leacock (eds). Special Issue of Natural Language Engineering on Educational Applications Using NLP.
• Shermis, M. D., Burstein, J., & Leacock, C. (2006). Applications of computers in assessment and analysis of writing. In C. A. MacArthur, S. Graham, & J. Fitzgerald (Eds.), Handbook of writing research. New York: Guilford Publications.
• Burstein, J. and Higgins, D. (2005). Advanced Capabilities for Evaluating Student Writing: Detecting Off-Topic Essays Without Topic-Specific Training. Proceedings of the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education, July 2005, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
• Burstein, J., Chodorow, M., and Leacock, C. (2004). Automated Essay Evaluation: The Criterion Online Service, AI Magazine, 25(3), 27-36.
• Higgins, D., Burstein, J., Marcu, D., and Gentile, C. (2004). Evaluating Multiple Aspects of Coherence in Student Essays. Proceedings of the HLT/NAACL Annual Meeting, Boston, May 2004.
• Burstein, J. and Wolska, M. (2003). Toward Evaluation of Writing Style: Overly Repetitious Word Use. In Proceedings of the 11th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Budapest, Hungary.
• Burstein, J., Marcu, D., and Knight, K. (2003). Finding the WRITE Stuff: Automatic Identification of Discourse Structure in Student Essays. In S. Harabagiu and F. Ciravegna (Eds.) Special Issue on Advances in Natural Language Processing, IEEE Intelligent Systems, Vol.18, no. 1 pp. 32-39. 
• Burstein, J., Kukich, K., Wolff, S., Lu, C., Chodorow, M., Braden-Harder, L., and Harris, M. D.  (1998). Automated Scoring Using A Hybrid Feature Identification Technique.  In the Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association of Computational Linguistics, August, 1998. Montreal, Canada. 

Recent Talks

• Co-Organizer (with Norbert Elliot)/Presenter, "Investigating Genre for Writing Measurement and Automated Writing Evaluation, Annual Meeting of the National Council of Educational Measurement, Philadelphia, PA, April 2014.
  
• Invited Speaker, Workshop on Writing and Readability Tools, University of Utrecht, Utrecht, The Netherlands, January 31, 2014.
• Keynote Speaker, The Far Reach of Multi-Word Expressions in Educational Technology, Ninth Workshop on Multi-Word Expressions, NAACL 2013, Atlanta, Georgia.
• Keynote Speaker, Technology for Second Language Learning , Iowa State University, September 22, 2012, Ames, IA
• Technische Universität Darmstadt, Computer Science Department, Design Considerations for NLP Applications for Educational Purposes, July 6, 2012.

• Automatic Essay Scoring System Using Content-Based Technologies, U.S. Patent Number, 6,115,683, issued September 5, 2000  (with Susanne Wolff, Chi Lu, and Randy Kaplan)
• System and method for computer-based automatic essay scoring U.S. Patent Number, 6,181,909, issued,  January 30, 2001  (with Bruce Kaplan, Don Rock, Martin Chodorow, Chi Lu, Susanne Wolff, Lisa Braden-Harder, and Karen Kukich)
• System And Method For Computer-Based Automatic Essay Scoring, U.S. Patent Number,  6,366,759 issued,  April 2, 2002  (with Bruce Kaplan, Don Rock, Martin Chodorow, Chi Lu, Susanne Wolff, Lisa Braden-Harder, and Karen Kukich)
• Methods of Automated Essay Analysis, U.S. Patent Number, 6,796,800, issued, September 28, 2004. (with Daniel Marcu, Slava Andreyev, Martin Chodorow, and Claudia Leacock)
• Automated Essay Scoring, U.S. Patent Number 7,088,949, issued August 8, 2006. (with Slava Andreyev and Chi Lu)
• Automated Annotation, U.S. Patent Number 7,127,208, issued October 24, 2006. (with Daniel Marcu)
• Method And System For Detecting Off-Topic Essays Without Topic-Specific Training, U.S. Patent Number 7,711,312, issued May 4, 2010. (with Derrick Higgins).
• Method and system for determining text coherence, U.S. Patent Number 7,720,675, issued May 18, 2010. (with Derrick Higgins, Daniel Marcu, and Claudia Gentile).
• Methods for automated essay analysis, U.S. Patent Number, 7,729,655, issued June 1, 2010 (with Daniel Marcu, Slava Andreyev, Martin Chodorow, and Claudia Leacock)
• Method and System for Automated Item Development for Language Learners 7,762,816, issued July 27, 2010.
• Automated Essay Scoring, U.S. Patent Number 7,769,339, issued August 3, 2010 (with Slava Andreyev and Chi Lu)
• Automated Annotation, U.S. Patent Number 7,796,937, issued September 10,  2010 (with Daniel Marcu).
• Automated Essay Scoring System, U.S. Patent Number 7,831,196, issued November 9,  2010 (with Yigal Attali and Slava Andreyev).
• Method and System for Automatic Generation of Adapted Content to Facilitate Reading Skill Development for Language Learners, U.S. Patent Number 8,239,762, issued August 7, 2012 (with Jane Shore, John Sabatini, and Matthew Ventura).

• Method and System for Instructing Language Learners. U.S. Patent Application Number Pending, filed April 1, 2005.
• Building Subjectivity Lexicons for Sentiment Analysis Systems for Use in Essay Scoring U.S. Patent Application No. 11948-501-888, filed October 21, 2011 (with Beata Beigman-Klebanov, Nitin Madnani, Adam Faulkner, and Joel Tetreault).
• Building Subjectivity Lexicons for Sentiment Analysis (with Beata Beigman-Klebanov, Nitin Madnani, and Adam Faulkner), filed March 2012.