Scientist
Tanja Heck
Tanja Heck
Member of Language and AI in Education lab
Tanja Heck has been a research associate and doctoral candidate since October 2021. Since 2025, she has been working at the IWM, where she contributes to the development of the intelligent tutoring system FeedBook and the analysis of data collected as part of the „AI2Teach“ project. Her work focuses on the automatic generation of linguistically variable practice exercises for English language teaching, as well as their adaptive selection and adjustment while a learner works on them based on the learner's profile.
Tanja Heck completed her bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering at Albstadt-Sigmaringen University, combined with professional training as an IT specialist. After working for a year as a software developer in an industrial company, she began a master's program in Computational Linguistics at the University of Tübingen, where she subsequently started her doctoral studies in Computer Science.
Project
Projects with a current term and projects that have taken place in the last 5 years are shown.
Individual tutoring in an extended digital teaching-learning concept for foreign language classrooms
Language and AI in Education lab
Duration 06/2020 - 05/2026
Go to Project
Publications
- Heck, T., & Meurers, D. (2024). Exercise parameters influencing exercise difficulty. Proceedings of the EUROCALL 2023: CALL for all Languages, 236-241. https://doi.org/10.4995/EuroCALL2023.2023.16921
- Heck, T., & Meurers, D. (2023). Exercise generation supporting adaptivity in intelligent tutoring systems. 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 (pp. 659-665). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36336-8_102
- Heck, T., & Meurers, D. (2023). On the relevance and learner dependence of co-text complexity for exercise difficulty. In D. Alfter, E. Volodina, T. François, A. Jönsson, & E. Rennes (Eds.). Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on NLP for Computer Assisted Language Learning (Vol. 53, pp. 71-84). LiU Electronic Press. https://aclanthology.org/2023.nlp4call-1.9.pdf
- Colling, L., Heck, T., & Meurers, D. (2023). Reconciling adaptivity and task orientation in the student dashboard of an intelligent language tutoring system. In E. Kochmar, J. Burstein, A. Horbach, R. Laarmann-Quante, N. Madnani, A. Tack, V. Yaneva, Z. Yuan, & T. Zesch (Eds.). Proceedings of the 18th workshop on innovative use of NLP for building educational applications (BEA 2023) (pp. 288-299). Association for Computational Linguistics. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2023.bea-1.25
- Heck, T., Meurers, D., & Nuxoll, F. (2022). Automatic exercise generation to support macro-adaptivity in intelligent language tutoring systems. In B. Arnbjörnsdóttir, B. Bédi, L. Bradley, K. Friðriksdóttir, H. Garðarsdóttir, S. Thouësny, & M. J. Whelpton (Eds.). Intelligent CALL, granular systems and learner data: Short papers from EUROCALL 2022 (pp. 162-167). Research-publishing.net. https://doi.org/10.14705/rpnet.2022.61.1452
- Heck, T., & Meurers, D. (2022). Generating and authoring high-variability exercises from authentic texts. In D. Alfter, E. Volodina, T. François, P. Desmet, F. Cornillie, A. Jönsson, & E. Rennes (Eds.). Proceedings of the 11th Workshop on NLP for Computer Assisted Language Learning (Vol. 190, pp. 61-71). LiU Electronic Press. https://doi.org/10.3384/ecp190007
- Heck, T., & Meurers, D. (2022). Parametrizable exercise generation from authentic texts: Effectively targeting the language means on the curriculum. In E. Kochmar, J. Burstein, A. Horbach, R. Laarmann-Quante, N. Madnani, A. Tack, V. Yaneva, Z. Yuan, & T. Zesch (Eds.). Proceedings of the 17th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA 2022) (pp. 154-166). Association for Computational Linguistics. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2022.bea-1.20
Presentations und Conferences
- Colling, L., Heck, T., & Meurers, D. (2023, July 13). Reconciling adaptivity and task orientation in the student dashboard of an intelligent language tutoring system. 18th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA). Toronto, ON, Canada. https://sig-edu.org/bea/2023 [Poster presentation]