Survey of Natural Language Processing for Education: Taxonomy, Systematic Review, and Future Trends

TL;DR

This survey reviews recent NLP advances applied to education, categorizing applications, discussing challenges and techniques, especially involving large language models, and outlining future research directions to enhance educational tools and methods.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive taxonomy of NLP applications in education, highlights recent techniques including LLMs, and suggests future research directions for the field.

Findings

NLP techniques are effectively applied to educational tasks like question answering and assessment.

Large language models are increasingly integrated into educational NLP applications.

The survey identifies key challenges and promising future directions in NLP for education.

Abstract

Natural Language Processing (NLP) aims to analyze text or speech via techniques in the computer science field. It serves applications in the domains of healthcare, commerce, education, and so on. Particularly, NLP has been widely applied to the education domain and its applications have enormous potential to help teaching and learning. In this survey, we review recent advances in NLP with a focus on solving problems relevant to the education domain. In detail, we begin with introducing the related background and the real-world scenarios in education to which NLP techniques could contribute. Then, we present a taxonomy of NLP in the education domain and highlight typical NLP applications including question answering, question construction, automated assessment, and error correction. Next, we illustrate the task definition, challenges, and corresponding cutting-edge techniques based on the above taxonomy. In particular, LLM-involved methods are included for discussion due to the wide usage of LLMs in diverse NLP applications. After that, we showcase some off-the-shelf demonstrations in this domain, which are designed for educators or researchers. At last, we conclude with five promising directions for future research, including generalization over subjects and languages, deployed LLM-based systems for education, adaptive learning for teaching and learning, interpretability for education, and ethical consideration of NLP techniques. We organize all relevant datasets and papers in the open-available Github Link for better review https://github.com/LiXinyuan1015/NLP-for-Education.