Dr. Sowmya Vajjala, Data Scientist at AbacusNext, Toronto, Canada, gave a talk on her observations for Automated Scoring of non-native writer essays for language proficiency on 5 July. She discussed her observations from research into Automated Essay Scoring (AES) approaches for 5 languages. She also talked about the possibility of a “Universal” scorer, which can score texts written in any language, for its language proficiency.
Sowmya is an IIIT-H alumnus and received her MS in Computer Science and Engineering under the guidance of Prof. Vasudeva Varma in 2009. Her research interests are primarily in inter-disciplinary research that focuses on the intersection of NLP, Machine Learning and education. Apart from this, she is also interested in exploring linguistics for the development of NLP resources for Dravidian languages. Sowmya is currently working on projects that focus on developing AI solutions for legal domain.