Humans are good teachers because they show understanding of people’s problems, but machines are good at dealing with large amounts of data, seeing patterns, and giving feedback
- Nick Saville, Cambridge Assessment
“We arrived to our destination and we looked each other.”
To a native English speaker, the mistakes in this sentence are clear. But someone learning English would need a teacher to point them out, explain the correct use of prepositions and check later that they have improved. All of which takes time.
Now imagine the learner was able to submit a few paragraphs of text online and, in a matter of seconds, receive an accurate grade, sentence-by-sentence feedback on its linguistic quality and useful suggestions for improvement.
This is Cambridge English Write & Improve – an online learning system, or ‘computer tutor’, to help English language learners – and it’s built on information from almost 65 million words gathered over a 20-year period from tests taken by real exam candidates speaking 148 different languages living in 217 different countries or territories.
Built by Professor Ted Briscoe’s team in Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory, it’s an example of a new kind of tool that uses natural language processing and machine learning to assess and give guidance on text it has never seen before, and to do this indistinguishably from a human examiner.
“About a billion people worldwide are studying English as a further language, with a projected peak in 2050 of about two billion,” says Briscoe. “There are 300 million people actively preparing for English exams at any one time. All of them will need multiple tests during this learning process.”
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Image: Mouse
Credit: The District
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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