Adam Nohejl, Special Researcher, and Hitomi Yanaka, Team Director of the Explainable AI Team, received the Best Paper Award at the 21st Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA 2026), held alongside ACL 2026.
This award is given to the team that achieved the highest performance on the test data in the Shared Task organized by BEA 2026.
The task focused on predicting vocabulary difficulty for English learners, where participating teams built prediction models using the provided dataset.
This year, two teams were selected as winners, and the Explainable AI Team was recognized as one of them for its outstanding model performance and innovative approach.
Awarded Work:
Sakura at BEA 2026 Shared Task 1: What Makes Vocabulary Difficult?
Adam Nohejl, Xuanxin Wu, Yusuke Ide, Maria Angelica Riera Machin, Yi-Ning Chang, Hitomi Yanaka
https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2026.bea-1.84