2026Q3 Reports: SIGEDU
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
- Membership: SIGEDU has 486 members.
- Officers: Officers were elected to serve from 2021 - 2026 as follows: Ekaterina Kochmar, Chair; Andrea Horbach, Secretary; Zheng Yuan, Treasurer. Next elections will be held in 2026.
- Board: The SIGEDU Committee is composed of Ekaterina Kochmar, Andrea Horbach, Zheng Yuan, Jill Burstein, Nitin Madnani, Anais Tack, and Victoria Yaneva. Ronja Laarmann-Quante and Marie Bexte are a continuing members, and Stefano Banno and Bashar Alhafni are new members of the Organizing Committee for the annual workshop for Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Application (BEA).
- Workshop: The SIG’s major activity is the organization of the annual workshop. In 2026, the 21st Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Application (BEA) was held in a hybrid mode – in San Diego in conjunction with ACL 2026 and online. It was run as a 2-day workshop for the second year in a row, but for the first time, we had one dedicated virtual and one in-person day. BEA 2026 received 132 submissions to the main workshop track and accepted 64 papers (48% acceptance rate). In addition, we also hosted two shared tasks on Vocabulary Difficulty Prediction for English Learners and Rubric-based Short Answer Scoring for German, which attracted participation from multiple international teams; a half-day tutorial on Theory of Mind and Application in Educational Context; and a panel on Transitioning from Academia to the EdTech Industry. The SIG intends to submit a workshop proposal to an ACL-sponsored conference in 2027.
- Other activities: The SIG is on the Board of the International Alliance to Advance Learning in the Digital Age (IAALDE). Part of this relationship involves selecting a paper from the SIG’s workshop to be presented at another venue associated with other Board members upon demand. This is an effort to cross-pollinate across AI in education organizations.
- Website and mailing list: We have a working website that lists upcoming events of interest to our members and links to BEA proceedings. New members can sign up through a form on the website.