21st Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications

Grand Hyatt Manchester San Diego

Quick Info  
Co-located with ACL 2026
Location San Diego, California, United States
Dates July 6-7, 2026 (TBC)
Organizers Ekaterina Kochmar, Bashar Alhafni, Stefano Bannó, Marie Bexte, Jill Burstein, Andrea Horbach, Ronja Laarmann-Quante, Anaïs Tack, Victoria Yaneva, Zheng Yuan
Contact bea.nlp.workshop@gmail.com
GitHub To share your code and data with the BEA community, feel free to use the #bea-workshop topic.

Description

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 400 members.

The workshop’s continuing growth reflects how technology is increasingly fulfilling societal demands. For instance, the BEA16 workshop in 2021 hosted a panel discussion on “New Challenges for Educational Technology in the Time of the Pandemic” addressing the pressing issues around COVID-19. Additionally, NLP has evolved to aid diverse learning domains, including writing, speaking, reading, science, and mathematics, as well as the related intra-personal (e.g., self-confidence) and inter-personal (e.g., peer collaboration) skills. Within these areas, the community continues to develop and deploy innovative NLP approaches for use in educational settings.

Another significant advancement in educational applications within the Computational Linguistics (CL) community is the continuing series of shared-task competitions organized by and hosted at the BEA workshop. Over the years, this initiative has included four dedicated tasks focused solely on grammatical error detection and correction. Moreover, NLP/Education shared tasks have expanded into novel research areas, such as the Automated Evaluation of Scientific Writing at BEA11, Native Language Identification at BEA12, Second Language Acquisition Modeling at BEA13, Complex Word Identification at BEA13, Generating AI Teacher Responses in Educational Dialogues at BEA18, and Automated Prediction of Item Difficulty and Item Response Time and Multilingual Lexical Simplification at BEA19. These competitions have significantly bolstered the visibility and interest in our field.

The 21st BEA will be a 2-day workshop, with one in-person workshop day and one virtual workshop day. The workshop will feature a keynote talk, and a main workshop track with oral presentation sessions and large poster sessions to facilitate the presentation of a wide array of original research. Moreover, there will be a half-day tutorial, and two shared tasks comprising an oral overview presentation by the shared task organizers and several poster presentations by the shared task participants.

Committees

Organizing Committee