Second Call for Papers: *The 20th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA 2025)*

*Location*: Vienna, Austria and online (co-located with ACL 2025) *Date*: Thursday, July 31 and Friday, August 1, 2025 *Website*: https://sig-edu.org/bea/2025 https://sig-edu.org/bea/2025 *Submission Deadline*: Thursday, April 17, 2025, 11:59pm UTC-12 *Submission Link*: https://softconf.com/acl2025/bea2025/

WORKSHOP 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) (https://sig-edu.org) in 2017, which currently has over 400 members.

The 20th BEA workshop will be the first edition of BEA as *a 2-day workshop*, and it will feature a keynote by *Kostiantyn Omelianchuk (Grammarly)*, oral presentation sessions and large poster sessions to facilitate the presentation of a wide array of original research. This year, the workshop is also hosting *a shared task on Pedagogical Ability Assessment of AI-powered Tutors*, and *a half-day tutorial on LLMs for Education: Understanding the Needs of Stakeholders, Current Capabilities and the Path Forward *(more details on both to follow). We expect that the workshop will continue to highlight novel technologies and opportunities for educational NLP in English as well as other languages.

The workshop will accept submissions of both full papers and short papers, eligible for either oral or poster presentation at https://softconf.com/acl2025/bea2025/. We solicit papers that incorporate NLP methods, including, but not limited to:

- use of generative AI in education and its impact; - automated scoring of open-ended textual and spoken responses; - automated scoring/evaluation for written student responses (across multiple genres); - game-based instruction and assessment; - educational data mining; - intelligent tutoring; - collaborative learning environments; - peer review; - grammatical error detection and correction; - learner cognition; - spoken dialog; - multimodal applications; - annotation standards and schemas; - tools and applications for classroom teachers, learners and/or test developers; and - use of corpora in educational tools.

INVITED TALKS The workshop will feature a keynote by Kostiantyn Omelianchuk (Grammarly), and an invited talk by a speaker from one of the IAALDE ( https://alliancelss.com) societies.

SHARED TASK The workshop will also host a shared task on Pedagogical Ability Assessment of AI-powered Tutors. See more details here: https://sig-edu.org/sharedtask/2025

IMPORTANT DATES All deadlines are 11.59 pm UTC-12 (anywhere on earth).

- Submission deadline: *Thursday, April 17, 2025* - Notification of acceptance: *Thursday, May 22, 2025* - Camera-ready papers due: *Monday, June 9, 2025* - Workshop: *Thursday, July 31, and Friday, August 1, 2025*

SUBMISSION INFORMATION We will be using the ACL Submission Guidelines for the BEA Workshop this year. Authors are invited to submit a long paper of up to eight (8) pages of content, plus unlimited references; final versions of long papers will be given one additional page of content (up to 9 pages) so that reviewers’ comments can be taken into account. We also invite short papers of up to four (4) pages of content, plus unlimited references. Upon acceptance, short papers will be given five (5) content pages in the proceedings. Authors are encouraged to use this additional page to address reviewers’ comments in their final versions. We generally follow ACL submission guidelines and will require that all submitted papers should include a dedicated "Limitations" section, which does not count toward the page limit.

Papers which describe systems are also invited to give a demo of their system. If you would like to present a demo in addition to presenting the paper, please make sure to select either “long paper + demo” or “short paper + demo” under “Submission Category” in the START submission page.

Previously published papers cannot be accepted. The submissions will be reviewed by the program committee. As reviewing will be blind, please ensure that papers are anonymous. Self-references that reveal the author’s identity, e.g., “We previously showed (Smith, 1991) …”, should be avoided. Instead, use citations such as “Smith previously showed (Smith, 1991) …”.

We have also included conflict of interest in the submission form. You should mark all potential reviewers who have been authors on the paper, are from the same research group or institution, or who have seen versions of this paper or discussed it with you.

We will be using the START conference system to manage submissions: https://softconf.com/acl2025/bea2025/

DOUBLE SUBMISSION POLICY We will follow the official ACL double-submission policy. Specifically, papers being submitted both to BEA and another conference or workshop must:

- Note on the title page the other conference or workshop to which they are being submitted. - State on the title page that if the authors choose to present their paper at BEA (assuming it was accepted), then the paper will be withdrawn from other conferences and workshops.

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE - Ekaterina Kochmar, MBZUAI - Andrea Horbach, Hildesheim University - Ronja Laarmann-Quante, Ruhr University Bochum - Marie Bexte, FernUniversität in Hagen - Anaïs Tack, KU Leuven, imec - Victoria Yaneva, National Board of Medical Examiners - Bashar Alhafni, New York University (NYU) & CAMeL Lab in NYUAD - Zheng Yuan, King’s College London - Jill Burstein, Duolingo

Workshop contact email address: bea.nlp.workshop@gmail.com

PROGRAM COMMITTEE https://sig-edu.org/bea/2025#program-committee