Center for Advanced Intelligence Project

Team Sakura, including Adam Nohejl, Postdoctoral Researcher, and Hitomi Yanaka, Team Director of the Explainable AI Team, won the Open Track of the BEA 2026 Shared Task “Vocabulary Difficulty Prediction for English Learners,” held in conjunction with the ACL 2026 workshop BEA 2026.

Read more in an ArXiv pre-print: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2605.14257
Explore explanations of word difficulty online: https://ynklab.github.io/vocabulary-difficulty/

• What Makes Words Hard? Sakura at BEA 2026 Shared Task on Vocabulary Difficulty Prediction
  Adam Nohejl (RIKEN AIP)
  Xuanxin Wu (University of Osaka)
  Yusuke Ide (Nara Institute of Science and Technology)
  Maria Angelica Riera Machin (Nara Institute of Science and Technology)
  Yi-Ning Chang (National Tsing Hua University)
  Hitomi Yanaka (The University of Tokyo / RIKEN AIP / Tohoku University)

BEA 2026 is a workshop held in conjunction with ACL 2026, focusing on the innovative use of natural language processing (NLP) for building educational applications.

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