Foreword

Abstract

The 20th volume of the CLEI electronic journal includes six papers selected from an open call for papers on Natural Language Processing (NLP), processed by invited editors Gerardo Sierra and César Aguilar, and an additional regular paper. The NLP subject was suggested by Gabriela Marín and Antonio Leoni de León, the chairs of NLPCR 2016, the First Costa-Rican Colloquium on Natural Language Processing. The invited editors took care of the review process and the selection of the six papers, as discussed in their Preface which opens this issue. The additional regular paper is a contribution by Jose Aguilar, Guido Riofrío, and Eduardo Encalada, titled "Learning Analytics focused on student behavior. Case study: dropout in distance learning institutions", which focuses on the use of Learning Analytics for undestanding student behavior in the context of distance learning universities, particularly focuses on the students’ behavior, with the goal of identifying factors that influence the decision of a student to abandon their studies, predicting students susceptible to abandon their studies, and defining their motivational patterns. This issue, which opens the 20th volume of the journal, is a mark of the success of the mission of CLEIej as a vehicle for publishing Latin American based original research in subjects of international interest; we are glad to be able to develop this mission with the support of the researchers who kindly contribute their time as invited editors and reviewers of the papers received.