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Challenges and risks of the use of NLP summary applications in EFL reading and writing #45

Artificial intelligence (AI) applications in education are on the rise and have received a lot of attention in the last couple of years. Natural Language Processing (NLP) in AI technologies is closely related to our field of foreign language teaching and learning. NLP in AI development has recently reached such a level that there are available a few applications that can analyze a huge number of call center text threads and phone calls for labeling and sorting by moods and style. Another challenging NLP development is online services that can produce summary reports on web passages and newspaper articles on the internet in a minute or so. Naturally, it is anticipated that EFL learners may blindly depend on such summarization applications for reading assignments, as they do with machine translation applications for writing assignments. EFL teachers should start thinking about how to incorporate such challenging developments in AI and NLP, rather than ignoring such trends. This paper demonstrates one summarization application called “SummarizeBot” and to discuss the merits and possible risks in EFL teaching of reading and writing. A holistic evaluation will be presented as to the quality of the gathered collection of summary reports both in English and Japanese. Join us to discuss how such summary services can be used in teaching reading and writing skills in EFL settings.