Sunday, July 25, 2004

UPPER SADDLE RIVER, N.J., June 29, 2004 - Pearson Education, the world's largest education company, today announced the acquisition of Knowledge Analysis Technologies, a privately held Boulder, Colo., company that provides products and services based on proprietary and patented machine-learning technology for text understanding. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. The company will become a business of Pearson Education and will operate two divisions, The Knowledge Analysis Technologies Institute and Pearson KAT. It will continue to be based in Boulder. The current management will remain, including founder and president Dr. Thomas K. Landauer, who will report to Douglas Kubach, president and CEO of Pearson Educational Measurement. Knowledge Analysis Technologies' flagship product, the Intelligent Essay Assessor, is designed to automatically analyze and score standardized writing assessments. "We're very excited to add the knowledge and expertise of the KAT organization to our portfolio of solutions for the educational market," said Douglas Kubach. "We believe KAT's proven, valid and reliable technology offers Pearson many potential applications across the enterprise." -- This is an application of Latent Semantic Analysis technology that produces similarity scoring between submitted essays and standard marked essays and has been demonstrated to be as reliable as instuctor marking of essays.  With the move to Pearson the impressive technology may become much more widely accessible and make a difference in instructor workloads enabling more extensive use of writing assignments in mainstream higher education. --  BL 8:26:02 AM      Google It!.