There will be a School of IT  Colloquium by 'Maletšabisa (Tšabi) Molapo who is a Research Scientist at IBM Research.  Her talk is entitled "Africa Peer and Automated Assessment Towards Accelerated Second Language Learning in High Schools: NLP Use Cases".
 

Abstract:
Achieving proficiency in subjects such as writing and art requires a learner to take practice exercises frequently, receive immediate feedback and apply corrections within short cycles. In learning settings where instructor-learner ratios are high, it is impractical for instructors to administer frequent exercises and deliver actionable feedback timeously. This is especially true in many South African schools, where learners need frequent exercises and corrective feedback to learn and achieve English proficiency. IBM Research and The African School for Excellence (ASE) have entered a joint study agreement towards the collaborative research and development of an AI-powered peer assessment platform to accelerate English language learning in high schools. This talk will cover results from this project, and discuss current research on peer and automated language assessment to support second language learning. The talk will include use cases of various natural language processing techniques being applied to tasks like error detection, error correction, peer review meta-summarisation and proficiency classification.
 
Bio:
 'Maletšabisa (Tšabi) Molapo is a Research Scientist at IBM Research - Africa. Her research interests lie at the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction and Artificial Intelligence (AI). She designs, builds, deploys and evaluates AI solutions for rural and low-income urban areas, with applications in education and healthcare. Within AI research, she is interested in Natural Language Processing, AI Ethics and fairness, and human-centred machine intelligence. She completed a PhD in Computer Science at the University of Cape Town (UCT), based at the centre in ICT for Development (ICT4D).