POLKE: AI in Education

In recent years, the application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in education has evolved significantly, resulting in the emergence of a new AI in Education (AIED) research stream that aims to increase educational success through the use of AI technologies.

Based on previous work in the area of AI for foreign language (L2) instruction, a dual-purpose research group is being established: The first goal is to develop a method for extracting linguistic knowledge in a foreign language (L2) that is useful for modeling learners' domain and knowledge in the second language. The second goal is to contribute to automatic Natural Language Generation (NLG) by developing a technology to control the difficulty level of the language to be generated.

The first component will extend the previous work on the representation of linguistic knowledge using NLP ("Natural Language Processing") in terms of linguistic complexity by making the approach more pedagogically meaningful and thus increasing the practical utility of this technology. The new approach will then, in a second step, extend existing NLG approaches to create a natural language generation technology capable of automatically adjusting complexity for lower-level readers, especially non-native speakers. Slide's project will thus not only benefit AIED research, but also advance current AI and NLG technologies.