Dear all,

We invite participation in our Shared Task on Vocabulary Difficulty Prediction for English Learners, which will be hosted at Thehttps://sig-edu.org/bea/2026 https://sig-edu.org/bea/2026 21st Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applicationshttps://sig-edu.org/bea/2026 (co-located with ACL 2026) both online and in person in San Diego, CA, United States.

This shared task focuses on predicting the difficulty of English vocabulary for learners with different L1 backgrounds. Evaluation will use the British Council’s Knowledge-based Vocabulary Lists (KVL), which provide psychometrically calibrated difficulty scores for English learners with Spanish, German, and Mandarin L1s. The task includes a Closed Track, limited to the provided data and standard NLP resources, and an Open Track, which allows external data and use of LLMs, to explore the full potential of current AI approaches.

Important Dates 26 January: Release of training data and baseline modelshttps://github.com/britishcouncil/bea2026st 20 March: Test data release 27 March: System submissions from teams due 3 April: Announcement of evaluation results by the organisers 24 April: System papers due 1 May: Paper reviews returned 12 May: Final camera-ready submissions 2-3 July: BEA 2026 workshop at ACL

Further details can be found at our shared task websitehttps://www.britishcouncil.org/data-science-and-insights/bea2026st. Please send any questions to vocabularychallenge@britishcouncil.orgmailto:vocabularychallenge@britishcouncil.org or post a new topic in our forumhttps://groups.google.com/g/bea-2026-shared-task/. We look forward to your participation!

Organisers: Mariano Felice (British Council) and Lucy Skidmore (British Council). The British Council is the United Kingdom's international organisation for cultural relations and educational opportunities. A registered charity: 209131 (England and Wales) SC037733 (Scotland). This message is for the use of the intended recipient(s) only and may contain confidential information. If you have received this message in error, please notify the sender and delete it. The British Council accepts no liability for loss or damage caused by viruses and other malware and you are advised to carry out a virus and malware check on any attachments contained in this message.