Best Student Paper Award to Ángeles Ortega-Luque at the Artificial Intelligence Research in Applied Linguistics Conference 2026

The fourth annual Artificial Intelligence Research in Applied Linguistics (AIRiAL ) Conference took place on September 25-26, 2026, at Teachers College, Columbia University, in New York City. This conference brings together scholars, researchers, entrepreneurs, and language learning and assessment organizations to discuss the intersection of Applied Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence.

Georgetown University Ph.D. candidate Ángeles Ortega-Luque received the Best Student Paper Award for her presentation, Multimodal and Multimodel AI Applied to Assess Language Learners’ Depth of Processing of Written Feedback. Her paper is part of her doctoral dissertation research in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, drawing on the knowledge and experience she gained through four elective courses in Computational Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics. 

As part of her study, Ángeles created a multimodal corpus (audio and text) and used multiple Python-based natural language processing models to assess the depth of processing of written corrective feedback. Her investigation applies computational linguistics to theoretically driven and empirically proven research methods to analyze complex cognitive, language, and educational data.