Given the space limitation, your reaction essay should not include a complete summary of the reading material. Instead, you should first always explain whether and how you think the paper is interesting from both NLP and AIED perspectives. What are the opportunities and challenges in applying NLP to this educationally motivated problem? If published in an NLP venue, how would this work need to be changed to contribute to AIED? And vice-versa.
Then limit the rest of your reactions/ideas to one or two per paper. Your ideas may have a number of forms: (a) You may compare the work to related material; (b) You may hypothesize about ways in which the work could have been improved; (c) You may think about ways to expand on the work (conceptually or computationally); (d) You may critique the work, including its conceptual framework, methodology, and/or results; or (e) you may describe something you don't understand that you would like the class to discuss (explain exactly what you don't understand).
Reaction essays are due by midnight FRIDAY (the weekend before the Monday class) and 1:00 PM TUESDAY (the day before the class during which the paper will be presented).
We will use the Blackboard forum system. Please post your reaction essays in plain text. Do not use attachments. Post them as messages, not as uploaded files.