5 applications of NLP in Education

Let us take a trip down memory lane. Imagine you are 5 years old, standing with your dad at the railway platform to board the next train. From all the directions you can hear a sound coming in one specific voice. 

 

As you try to understand what that voice is saying, you are hit by the realization - that is not a human voice at all! In fact, it is a robotic voice announcing the arrival and departure timings of the trains. 

 

Since then, many years have passed by and our ears have become accustomed to hearing such robotic voices making announcements on the subway, while using our smartphones or even in classrooms. 

 

All these are certain daily life examples of an artificial intelligence system called Natural Language Processing or NLP. In today’s blog, we will be discussing the benefits of NLP in education and how it can be further improved. Let’s dive in.

 

What is Natural Language Processing (NLP)?

 

NLP is the branch of artificial intelligence (AI) that deals with teaching a computer to understand, process, and generate language. The technology powers search engines, machine translation services, and voice assistants.

 

While the word was originally used to describe a computer's capacity to read, it has subsequently become a catchall term for all computational linguistics. Natural language generation (NLG) — a computer's ability to generate its own communication — and natural language understanding (NLU) — the ability to grasp slang, mispronunciations, misspellings, and other linguistic variations — are two subcategories.

 

NLP has a number of applications, from chatbots to that in the business sector, to social media monitoring. But one sector that is benefitting from NLP the most nowadays is the education sector. 

 

The children or students accustomed to listening to the voices of the teachers and fellow students in the class are now adapting to the new wave of technological transformation.

 

Let us have a look at how NLP has transformed the educational sector.

 

Applications of NLP in Education

 

In educational contexts, NLP has been successfully and commonly used to identify errors in student grammar and mechanics, as well as to provide holistic ratings for five-paragraph essays. 

 

While these are essential areas, NLP has the ability to solve more serious issues that students and teachers encounter in the classroom.

 

1. Using Natural Language Processing (NLP) or Writing

 

NLP is currently being used in the classroom to assist kids to enhance their reading and writing skills. The most popular applications for writing and reading NLP solutions are these. 

 

For example, if a student uploads a five-paragraph essay, NLP language learning technology can provide meaningful comments to help them better. This instruction applies to prose, grammar, and writing mechanics in general. 

 

Grammarly, an NLP-based software that makes writing clear and error-free, is a superb example of a technological application. The software analyses text using technology and make suggestions for changes.

 

NLP can also provide more specific feedback, such as pointing out the lack of key argumentative facts to back up a point or assertion, or a section of text that is lacking in proof.

 

However, a good approach for NLP and education to collaborate is for teachers to use NLP technology to observe what is going on with their students and their unique skills, rather than merely helping students submit better quality work to their teachers.

 

More NLP solutions will be needed as technology advances for both students and teachers to help define the cognitive process of students' writing, resulting in recommendations on how to improve on a fundamental level, whether it's general writing mechanics or the structure of a work.

 

(Must read: 10 Major Uses of Natural Language Processing)

 

2. Improving Reading Skills with NLP and Education

 

If pupils are having trouble reading in class, there are NLP applications in education that can help. NLP algorithms can detect flaws with a student's reading skills rapidly and provide real-time, automatic feedback on how to improve. 

 

Of course, a teacher would never have the time or resources in a classroom full of kids to go around and give this kind of feedback to each and every student, which is why NLP solutions are becoming increasingly popular.

 

Another amazing characteristic of NLP in education is that it can assist match students with reading content that is most suited to them, both in terms of challenge and productivity.
 

Teachers, once again, would never have the time to figure this out on their own, which is why NLP solutions that can do this are so appreciated.

 

NLP technology has also been shown to grade student reading scores significantly more correctly than traditional methods like the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level test. 

 

Another reason why application programming interface (API) solutions are becoming more popular and being used by a growing number of companies is because of this. (Source)

 

3. Motivating Behavior Using NLP

 

One of the most difficult responsibilities a teacher has is inspiring kids to do their work and learn. A pupil only needs to be bored for a brief period of time before entirely losing track of the rest of the lesson. This is why there is such a strong focus on keeping kids involved and motivated.

 

This is why natural language processing has become such a fascinating tool in education.

 

NLP & machine learning technology can evaluate the language spoken by professors and students in a classroom to determine their mental states during class time. Teachers can use this study to see how students react to instructional approaches in real-time and what can be done to make them more engaging.

 

NLP for instructors can help identify pupils who are having difficulty understanding the class and suggest kids who may require additional attention to develop. This has created a market for NLP monitoring technologies that can track, record, and analyze student behavior and attention spans during lessons.

 

Naturally, stealth testing may be required for the most accurate results, but natural language processing examples for education will need to be set up and evaluated to determine how effective this may be. 

 

NLP experts are almost certainly working on the case. If implemented, there may be rules that need to be investigated before commercializing these services.

 

(Must read: Data science in Education)

 

4. Question answering

 

Students and teachers love essay-style assessments, quizzes, and flashcards, but preparing them manually can be difficult for already busy professionals.

 

NLP can assist you in this area by creating questions and answers for your educational materials. It can also determine how closely a student's written responses match the facts contained in the learning material. 

 

It may tailor the questions and assessment to a student's unique learning needs, such as reading level and learning tempo. It can grade an essay on grammar, structure, semantics, and reasoning, which is a huge time saver for teachers.

 

By adding a sequence-to-sequence layer to a pre-trained transformer model, a question-answering model is produced in the same way as a summarization model. It should produce another sequence, which is the answer, for a query, which is the input sequence. 

 

Using subject-specific question-answer datasets, the assemblage of the pre-trained base model and sequence-to-sequence layer is fine-tuned.

 

5. Chatbots

 

Chatbots are another feature to consider because they can operate as robotic educators who use conversational AI to explain things and answer inquiries.

 

A voice recognition sequence-to-sequence model is built in the same way that a question-answering model is. It begins by transcribing the student's spoken questions or responses into text. 

 

After that, a question-answering model generates answers or evaluates the student's responses. Text-to-speech synthesis is used to speak the results back to the pupil.

 

Intangible characteristics such as enthusiasm, kindness, warmth, friendliness, and accent can be baked into the synthesized voice to make the student feel at ease.

 

(Suggested blog: Virtual Reality in Education)

 

End-Note

 

These were some of the applications of NLP in the education sector. NLP has transformed it dramatically with some of the amazing features. This step of using NLP in the education sector can prove to be a revolutionary one and can benefit both students and teachers equally.

 

Looking at the technological revolution going on in the education sector, Scott Crossley, a professor of Georgia university says it rightly:

 

“NLP can thus both improve the quality of instruction within individual assignments and help educators improve the learning environment more broadly. It’s still early days, but the research progress so far suggests that NLP can have a profoundly positive impact on learning.”