Pearson turns artificial intelligence attention to essay marking

Having used IBM's Watson technology to create a virtual learning assistant, Pearson has played a significant role in driving forward the development of artificial intelligence in higher education. Now the international education company is poised to take the next step by developing an AI tool that can grade university essays. Pearson's tool, which is currently being developed for piloting in US higher education, is not the first product of its type; similar platforms have been developed at the University of Manchester and at the University of California, Berkeley. But Pearson's global reach and its experience of using Watson – which can analyse huge amounts of text and data and use this to answer complex questions in natural language – could mean that its new tool represents a significant step forward. Milena Marinova, who has been hired by Pearson from chipmaker Intel to lead its work on AI, told Times Higher Education that the new tool would be able to mark essays in a more sophisticated fashion than previous grading assistants. "For any automation or assisted decision-making, abstraction is very difficult, but the new product is going to allow the professor to train the system," explained Ms Marinova, Pearson's senior vice-president for AI products and solutions.