Dana Goldstein considers the future of robo-grading, which could use online encyclopedias to help fact-check essays:
An experimental program called the Stanford Named Entity Recognizer can pick out proper nouns like "Chaucer" and "Albert Einstein" with 82 percent precision. Another program, called ReVerb, can recognize about one-third of the "facts" writers present on such topics, such as the century in which Chaucer lived (the 14th) and Einstein’s most famous scientific contribution (the Theory of Relativity). Since computers can already recognize phrases that hint at an argument—such as "caused by" and "led to"—it isn’t inconceivable that in coming years, a program will be able to search Web sources on a certain topic, and then use its findings to assess the plausibility of a writer’s assertions.
Kevin Drum bets that a computer will be as good as a human at scoring student essays by 2022.
The Dish 