With the rapid development of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), Web 2.0 online communities, social media, and mobile technologies in the big data era, there is a fast growth of learning resources such as online learning communities, open course videos, and other learning materials (e.g., Web pages, animations and documents). Confronting such a large volume of data, learners need an effective and efficient way to information organization. To achieve this goal, a powerful and versatile user model, which may contain various types of user information such as learning preferences, plans, pre-knowledge levels and contexts, is essential and critical. Such a user model can be exploited and applied in various Web-based learning applications like personalized learning paths discovery, learning resource recommendations, course opinions and sentiment analysis.

The second International Symposium on User Modeling and Language Learning is in conjunction with The 3rd International Symposium on Emerging Technologies for Education (http://www.itsci.mju.ac.th/SETE2018/) in Chiang Mai, Thailand during August 22-24, 2018. The aim of this symposium is to provide a forum for MOOC developers, e-learning developers, computational linguists, language educators, curriculum planners, material writers, and academia and industrial practitioners from disciplines of computer science, information systems and education to discuss recent advances in user modeling from perspectives of language learning. Authors of either theoretical or practical articles on user modeling and language learning, MOOCs or blended learning are encouraged to attend this symposium, explore potential education-oriented strategies, and create opportunities for future research collaborations.

We appreciate the interest and support of all attendees. Special thanks go to the ICWL organizers and Program Committee members. We are grateful to their hard work and the contributions of all the authors.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to the exploitation of user modeling and language learning, the identification of semantics underlying large volume of user data for user modeling and efficient algorithms for e-learning data management, and the applications of user modeling and language learning in research fields related to (but not limited to):

    User and learning resource modeling
    User profiling and personalization
    Learning resources recommendation and search
    Ontology mining and modeling for learning users
    Context modeling for users
    Sentiment mining for user review
    Cognitive-based user modeling
    Learning style and methodology modeling
    Learning assessments modeling
    Computer-assisted language learning (CALL)
    Mobile-assisted language learning (MALL)
    Computer-based language assessment
    Emerging technologies for language learning and teaching
    Evaluation of existing technologies for language learning and teaching
    Theoretical foundations of technology enhanced language learning (TELL)
    Technical applications of TELL
    Development of TELL
    Assessment of TELL
    Blended learning and TELL
    Online teaching tools and platforms
    Socio-educational perspectives and implications of TELL
    TELL in multimodal environments
    Data-driven learning (DDL) and TELL
    Direct and indirect application of DDL in TELL
    Corpora in language teaching

Paper Reviewing and Selection Process

Each paper will be reviewed by at least two reviewers from the symposium chairs and program committee members. Reviewers are selected based on their familiarity with the topics. Necessary procedures are to be carried out to avoid potential conflicts of interests during the review process, and review reports from the reviewers will be returned to the authors anonymously. In unusual cases, such as when an external reviewer fails to deliver a review on time, PC chairs will invite other reviewers who have sufficient expertise but are not among the program committee members. In those cases, at least two PC chairs will examine the review comments to ensure the quality of the review. Accepted papers will be selected based on the mean scores given by reviewers.

As part of the International Symposium on Emerging Technologies for Education (SETE) 2018, all accepted papers of this symposium will be included in the SETE Proceedings, which will be published in Springer's Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS). LNCS volumes are indexed in the ISI Conference Proceedings Citation Index, Scopus, EI Compendex, DBLP, etc.