# Survey of Natural Language Processing for Education: Taxonomy, Systematic Review, and Future Trends

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.07518 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.07518/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 156 of its 336 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Jan 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 156)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14168/) (2021)
- [Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03374/) (2021)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04761/) (2023)
- [Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.3215/) (2014)
- [VQA: Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00468/) (2015)
- [Learn to Explain: Multimodal Reasoning via Thought Chains for Science Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09513/) (2022)
- [Large Language Models Encode Clinical Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.13138/) (2022)
- [mT5: A massively multilingual pre-trained text-to-text transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11934/) (2020)
- [Show, Attend and Tell: Neural Image Caption Generation with Visual Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03044/) (2015)
- [Least-to-Most Prompting Enables Complex Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10625/) (2022)
- [What Disease does this Patient Have? A Large-scale Open Domain Question Answering Dataset from Medical Exams](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.13081/) (2020)
- [CodeBERT: A Pre-Trained Model for Programming and Natural Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08155/) (2020)
- [Program of Thoughts Prompting: Disentangling Computation from Reasoning for Numerical Reasoning Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12588/) (2022)
- [Multilingual Denoising Pre-training for Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08210/) (2020)
- [Diffusion-LM Improves Controllable Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14217/) (2022)
- [CodeT5: Identifier-aware Unified Pre-trained Encoder-Decoder Models for Code Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00859/) (2021)
- [RACE: Large-scale ReAding Comprehension Dataset From Examinations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04683/) (2017)
- [A Diagram Is Worth A Dozen Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.07396/) (2016)
- [Plug and Play Language Models: A Simple Approach to Controlled Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02164/) (2019)
- [Crowdsourcing Multiple Choice Science Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06209/) (2017)
- [Automatic Chain of Thought Prompting in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03493/) (2022)
- [Unified Language Model Pre-training for Natural Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03197/) (2019)
- [MathQA: Towards Interpretable Math Word Problem Solving with Operation-Based Formalisms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.13319/) (2019)
- [GraphCodeBERT: Pre-training Code Representations with Data Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.08366/) (2020)
- [Plan-and-Solve Prompting: Improving Zero-Shot Chain-of-Thought Reasoning by Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04091/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Challenges for AI in Multimodal STEM Assessments: a Human-AI Comparison](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.03013/) (2025)
- [RIDE: Difficulty Evolving Perturbation with Item Response Theory for Mathematical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.04120/) (2025)
- [Plausibility as Failure: How LLMs and Humans Co-Construct Epistemic Error](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.16750/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Natural Language Processing (NLP) aims to analyze text or speech via techniques in the computer science field. It serves applications in the domains of healthcare, commerce, education, and so on. Particularly, NLP has been widely applied to the education domain and its applications have enormous potential to help teaching and learning. In this survey, we review recent advances in NLP with a focus on solving problems relevant to the education domain. In detail, we begin with introducing the related background and the real-world scenarios in education to which NLP techniques could contribute. Then, we present a taxonomy of NLP in the education domain and highlight typical NLP applications including question answering, question construction, automated assessment, and error correction. Next, we illustrate the task definition, challenges, and corresponding cutting-edge techniques based on the above taxonomy. In particular, LLM-involved methods are included for discussion due to the wide usage of LLMs in diverse NLP applications. After that, we showcase some off-the-shelf demonstrations in this domain, which are designed for educators or researchers. At last, we conclude with five promising directions for future research, including generalization over subjects and languages, deployed LLM-based systems for education, adaptive learning for teaching and learning, interpretability for education, and ethical consideration of NLP techniques. We organize all relevant datasets and papers in the open-available Github Link for better review https://github.com/LiXinyuan1015/NLP-for-Education.