Robo-Writers, Translators, Chatbots: Developments in NLP and What it Means for Education

Did a student write that essay or a robot? Did a teacher provide that six trait feedback or was it an automated feedback system? Did that student understand that Mandarin dialog or did they translate it on the fly? Is that student talking to a mental health professional or a therapy-bot? If you are worried about plagiarism, things just got a lot more complicated with developments in Natural Language Processing (NLP), a branch of artificial intelligence that enables computers to understand, process, and generate language.