[Workshop Announcement] TALA 2026 – New Trends in Automatized Language Assessment (7th of April 2026, Louvain-la-Neuve + online)

We are pleased to announce the Workshop on New Trends in Automatized Language Assessment (TALA), which will take place on the 7th of April 2026 in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium and online (hybrid event).

This workshop aims to provide an overview of recent approaches in automatized language assessment and to offer researchers, academics and (PhD) students an opportunity to discuss current trends and methods in language assessment research.

The workshop will focus on proficiency assessment, with particular attention to:

* Automatic Readability Assessment (ARA), an interdisciplinary field investigating linguistic, cognitive and typographic factors influencing text comprehension across audiences and domains, such as education, institutional communication, digital accessibility and automated proficiency evaluation; * Automated Essay Scoring (AES), which aims to analyse written productions in order to evaluate writers’ competence, especially linguistic proficiency and to support both assessment practices and formative feedback generation.

The full program can be found below and includes an invited keynote talk and presentations selected through abstract submission. It includes detailed instructions to reach the venue and the specific room.

Invited speaker

Rodrigo Wilkens (University of Exeter) Talk title: From Simplification to Readability-Guided Text Adaptation

Rodrigo Wilkens specialises in computational readability modelling and automated essay scoring. His research focuses on multilingual proficiency assessment, linguistic feature modelling and the use of large language models for educational applications. His work includes the development and evaluation of ARA and AES systems, with particular attention to non-English languages, as well as research on transformer-based proficiency prediction, interpretability in automated assessment, and readability-guided text generation.

If you are interested, please register using this linkhttps://forms.cloud.microsoft/pages/responsepage.aspx?id=1JCwei76z068fEEntNWC7NMgaZDFP3hFouI6jRl2R_5UQklJNzVTTklMSzlNUEc3VTFORzVDSFVHWS4u&route=shorturl.

We look forward to welcome you to TALA 2026.

Best regards,

The TALA Organizing Team

Program:

* 14:00 - 14:10 - Session d’accueil

* 14:10 – 14:50 – Session 1

* 14:10 – 14:30

Cognitive Grounding of Linguistic Variables for Automatic Readability Assessment

Elodie Vanzeveren, Rodrigo Wilkens, Thomas François

* 14:30 – 14:50

Automated CEFR-Level Assignment for Ukrainian Texts

Olha Kanishcheva, Mikhail Kopotev

* 14:50 – 15:40 – Keynote

From Simplification to Readability-Guided Text Adaptation

Rodrigo Wilkens

* 15:40 – 16:00 – Coffee break

* 16:00 – 17:00 – Session 2

* 16:00 – 16:20

Automatic Essay Scoring and Feedback Generation in Basque Language Learning Ekhi Azurmendi, Xabier Arregi, Oier Lopez de Lacalle

* 16:20 – 16:40

AI, Human, or Hybrid? Evaluating the Reliability of AI Text Detection Tools in Multi-Authored Contexts

Laura C. Úbeda-Cuspinera, Sheila Queralt

* 16:40 – 17:00

Assessing L2 Writing with Generative AI: Comparing Models, Prompts, and Human Raters

Agnieszka Leńko-Szymańska, Jiří Milička

* 17:00 – 17:30 – Roundtable discussion and closing

Access

The event will take place at the

Salle du Conseil de la Faculté de Philosophie, Arts et Lettres (FIAL),

Collège Erasme, Place Blaise Pascal, 1 in 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve.