Can artificial intelligence (AI) aid students in the fields of economics and law in improving their writing and argumentative skills? Led by the lawyer Prof. Dr. Urs Kramer, researchers at the University of Passau pursue this question as part of the project DeepWrite, which has received funding in the amount of 2 million euros.

In various subjects, students have to learn subject specific writing and argumentative skills. These especially include the ability to study materials and use them as a reference point for their own texts, as well as the ability to adequately present subject matters in written form. Due to the increasing variety of student´s backgrounds, lecturers who only have a limited capacity, face challenges, when it comes to teaching students these skills.

The project aims at aiding students in improving aforementioned skills. For the beginning it will focus on students of law and economics. As part of this project, researchers will develop an AI-based assistance system, that will combine domain specific knowledge graphs with deep language analysis to create a scalable and adaptive learning and teaching programme through interaction with lecturers and students. The system will be suitable for synchronous, as well as asynchronous teaching, both online and in real life. If required, the system will then be transformed, to suit other subjects than the above mentioned.

At the University of Passau, lecturers have long been interested in promoting student engagement. With DeepWrite they can combine their knowledge concerning didactics with cutting edge information technology. For this they can make use of classEX, a programme developed by Prof. Dr. Johann Graf Lamdsdorff and Prof. Dr. Marcus Giamattei of the University of Passau, which has seen worldwide success in synchronised lecturing. By this the needed Data to train the AI can be collected in a legally compliant way. This will also enable students to receive feed back on the improvement of their skills.

The German ministry of education and research will fund the project over a time span of four years as part of the initiative “Künstliche Intelligenz in der Hochschulbildung”. Through this, the federal, as well as the state governments aim at implementing AI as a key technology for universities. The University of Passau is one of three Bavarian universities to receive individual funding for a project.