🧑‍🔬 Kate Knill

🏛️ Affiliations

🎓University of CambridgeCambridge · United Kingdom2012–2026 · 59 papersEmployment since 2012 · Research Professor, Engineeringcurrent🏢ToshibaWeybridge · United Kingdom2013–2026 · 5 paperscurrent🏢Cambridge University PressCambridge · United Kingdom2023 · 2 papers🏢ToshibaTokyo · Japan2012 · 2 papers🎓Imperial College LondonLondon · United Kingdom1990–1994Education 1990–1994 · PhD Digital Signal Processing, Electrical and Electronic Engineering🎓University of NottinghamNottingham · United Kingdom1987–1990Education 1987–1990 · B.Eng. (Joint Honours) Electronic Engineering and Mathematics, Theoretical Mechanics

From the bylines of their papers (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14), ORCID and Wikidata; institutions on papers are matched by machine.

🧭 Fields, topics and concepts

Of its works in our library, with the number of works on each.

📅 Works by year

2020s

2010s

📄 Papers

The most cited first (OpenAlex and our library).

1. Towards Using Conversations with Spoken Dialogue Systems in the Automated Assessment of Non-Native Speakers of English (2016 · 26 citations)
   Human-run English speaking exams usually include a live conversation with an examiner, but automated scoring has so far handled only monologue tasks, such as answering a prompt.
2. Off-topic Response Detection for Spontaneous Spoken English Assessment (2016 · 17 citations)
   Automated graders of spoken English mostly score pronunciation and fluency. Judging content requires first checking whether a candidate actually answered the question, rather than misunderstanding it or reciting memorised text. Earlier systems measured bag-of-words similarity, such as cosine distance over tf-idf or…
3. Exploiting the English Vocabulary Profile for L2 word-level vocabulary assessment with LLMs (2025 · 8 citations)
   The paper addresses fine-grained L2 vocabulary assessment. Instead of scoring whole essays or tagging words by part of speech alone, it gives each word a CEFR level based on the sense it carries in its sentence. The authors pair LLMs with the English Vocabulary Profile (EVP), a public resource built from the…
4. Speak & Improve Corpus 2025: an L2 English Speech Corpus for Language Assessment and Feedback (2024 · 5 citations)
   Research on automated speaking assessment and feedback for learners of English has been held back by a shortage of public, well-annotated L2 speech.
5. Speak & Improve Challenge 2025: Tasks and Baseline Systems (2024 · 3 citations)
   Building automatic tools that grade learner speech and give feedback is difficult. Learners speak spontaneously, the content is not known in advance, and their accents and grammar differ from L1 speakers. Progress has also been held back by a lack of well-labelled public data. The authors launch the Speak & Improve…
6. Exploiting the English Grammar Profile for L2 grammatical analysis with LLMs (2026 · 1 citation)
   The paper tackles automatic analysis of L2 English grammar that goes beyond error spotting. It also records which constructions learners attempt and whether they get them right. The authors build on the English Grammar Profile (EGP), a catalogue of over 1,000 constructs. Each construct is written as a can-do…
7. Controlling Implicit Shortcut Reliance in L2 Spoken English Auto-markers (2026)
   End-to-end graders for spoken English proficiency read raw audio or ASR transcripts directly. They can quietly come to depend on easy surface cues, such as how long a candidate keeps talking. This makes them gameable: a learner could pad an answer to raise the mark without speaking any better. Earlier fixes assume…

All works

8 works of theirs in our library, the most cited first; 7 with a page here, the others link their original until we summarise them.

1. Towards Using Conversations with Spoken Dialogue Systems in the Automated Assessment of Non-Native Speakers of EnglishAnnual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL)Diane Litman, Steve Young, Mark Gales, et al.2016 · 26 citations
2. Off-topic Response Detection for Spontaneous Spoken English AssessmentAnnual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)Andrey Malinin, Rogier Van Dalen, Kate Knill, et al.2016 · 17 citations
3. Grammatical error detection in transcriptions of spoken English ↗Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics · no summary yetAndrew Caines et al.2020 · 12 citations
4. Exploiting the English Vocabulary Profile for L2 word-level vocabulary assessment with LLMsWorkshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA)Stefano Bannò, Kate M. Knill, Mark J. F. Gales2025 · 8 citations
5. Speak & Improve Corpus 2025: an L2 English Speech Corpus for Language Assessment and FeedbackarXiv:2412.11986Kate Knill, Diane Nicholls, Mark J.F. Gales, et al.2024 · 5 citations
6. Speak & Improve Challenge 2025: Tasks and Baseline SystemsarXiv:2412.11985Mengjie Qian, Kate Knill, Stefano Banno, et al.2024 · 3 citations
7. Exploiting the English Grammar Profile for L2 grammatical analysis with LLMsarXiv:2603.17171Stefano Banno, Penny Karanasou, Kate Knill, et al.2026 · 1 citation
8. Controlling Implicit Shortcut Reliance in L2 Spoken English Auto-markersarXiv:2607.16085Shilin Gao, Mark J. F. Gales, Kate M. Knill2026

🤝 Co-authors here

10 co-authors with a page, the most papers together first.

• Mark Gales ×7
• Stefano Bannò ×3
• Diane Nicholls ×2
• Mengjie Qian ×2
• Penny Karanasou ×2
• Rogier van Dalen ×2
• David Vandyke
• Diane Litman
• Steve Young
• Yu Wang

Venues

Where their works here were published, the most works first, with the editions of those that have a page.

• Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL): ACL 2016
• Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA): BEA 2025
• Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL): SIGDIAL 2016
• Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

🔗 Cited by

Papers of our library cite their works 30 times (of the 149,439 papers whose bibliographies we read); 11 citing papers with a page here →.

Updated 30 October 2026

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