Tübingen Center for Digital Education

Elizabeth Bear

My research focuses on the design and evaluation of AI-enhanced educational technologies, with a focus on young learners in real classroom settings. For this purpose, I draw upon my background in diverse fields, including computational linguistics, education sciences, and psychology. 

In my PhD work, I designed and evaluated a conversational agent for second language learning aligned with the school curriculum, particularly the curricular goal of intercultural communicative competence. At the TüCeDE, I am applying this experience, as well as expanding to more domain-general learning processes, in the VOILA and AIS projects.  

since 04/2026
Research Associate

Tübingen Center for Digital Education (TüCeDE), University of Tübingen

10/2025 – 03/2026
Research Associate

Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien

04/2021 – 09/2025
Research Associate

Hector Research Institute for Education Sciences and Psychology, University of Tübingen

2018 - 2021
Graduate Research Assistant

Department of Linguistics, University of Tübingen

2018 - 2021
Master of Arts in Computational Linguistics

University of Tübingen 

2017 - 2018
English Teaching Fellow

Nazarbayev-Universität, Kasachstan

2016 - 2017
English Language Fellow

Bethlehem University, West Bank

2015 - 2016
English Language Fellow

Akdeniz University, Turkey

2012 - 2015
English Language Trainer

Samsung HRCD, South Korea

2011 - 2012
Master of Education in TESOL

Boston University, USA

2010 - 2011
English Language Instructor

Daegu, South Korea

2008 - 2010
English Language Teacher

Busan, South Korea

2004 - 2008
Bachelor of Arts in Linguistics and Psychology

McGill University, Canada

Publications

Publications

Bear, E., Chen, X., & Meurers, D. (2024). Writing style in a second language: Exploring individual differences in linguistic complexity in a large-scale corpus. In K. Ackerley & E. Castello (Eds.), Continuing learner corpus research: Challenges and opportunities. Selected papers from the Sixth Learner Corpus Research Conference (pp. 325-357). Presses universitaires de Louvain. https://pul.uclouvain.be/book/?GCOI=29303100485770

Bear, E., Chen, X., Souto, D. V., Ribeiro-Flucht, L., Rudzewitz, B., & Meurers, D. (2024). Designing a task-based conversational agent for EFL in German schools: Student needs, actions, and perceptions. System, 126, 103460. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2024.103460

Bear, E., Bodnar, S., Chen, X. (2023). Learner and linguistic factors in commercial ASR use for spoken language practice: A focus on form. Proc. 9th Workshop on Speech and Language Technology in Education (SLaTE), 161-165. https://doi.org/10.21437/SLaTE.2023-31

Bear, E., & Chen, X. (2023). Evaluating a conversational agent for second language learning aligned with the school curriculum. In N. Wang, G. Rebolledo-Mendez, V. Dimitrova, N. Matsuda, & O.C. Santos (Eds.), Artificial Intelligence in Education. Posters and Late Breaking Results, Workshops and Tutorials, Industry and Innovation Tracks, Practitioners, Doctoral Consortium and Blue Sky. AIED 2023. Communications in Computer and Information Science (Vol. 1831, pp. 142-147). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36336-8_22

Chen, X., Bear, E., Hui, B., Santhi-Ponnusamy, H., & Meurers, D. (2022). Education theories and AI affordances: Design and implementation of an intelligent computer assisted language learning system. In M.M. Rodrigo, N. Matsuda, A.I. Cristea, & V. Dimitrova (Eds.), Artificial Intelligence in Education. Posters and Late Breaking Results, Workshops and Tutorials, Industry and Innovation Tracks, Practitioners’ and Doctoral Consortium. AIED 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (Vol. 13356, pp. 582-585). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11647-6_120

Quixal, M., Rudzewitz, B., Bear, E., & Meurers, D. (2021). Automatic annotation of curricular language targets to enrich activity models and support both pedagogy and adaptive systems. In D. Alfter, E. Volodina, I. Pilan, J. Graën, & L. Borin (Eds.), Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on NLP for Computer Assisted Language Learning (pp. 15-27). LiU Electronic Press. https://aclanthology.org/2021.nlp4call-1.2.pdf

Bear, E., Höfels, D., & Manolescu, M. (2020). TueMix at SemEval-2020 Task 9: Logistic regression with linguistic feature set for sentiment analysis of code-mixed social media text. Proceedings of the Fourteenth Workshop on Semantic Evaluation, 1316-1321. https://aclanthology.org/anthology-files/pdf/semeval/2020.semeval-1.178.pdf

Third-Party Funding

2024–2025. Fostering intercultural communicative competence through a task-based conversational agent: A school-based intervention (Role: PI). Language Learning Dissertation Grant ($2000 USD). 

2022–2023. Can state-of-the-art commercial ASRs be used for ICALL systems with spoken language? (Role: PI). LEAD Graduate School & Research Network Intramural Research Grant (9,100).