Who we are 2020-01-08T13:02:59+00:00

Who we are

 

ELiT is owned by Cambridge Assessment and Cambridge University Press.

ELiT Logo

ELiT has assembled a team of specialists to deliver the products including:

Software Engineers

Experienced software engineers develop our toolkits to ensure they are robust and adaptable.

Data Scientists

Big-data scientists ensure our products can scale to accommodate the demands of users worldwide.

Annotators and Teachers

EFL teachers annotate our training data to ensure our tools are accurate and perform on real-world data.

Partners

We work closely with our partners.

ELiT is disrupting the status quo for English Language Training (ELT) by offering a smart online solution that leverages artificial intelligence to provide fast, contextualised feedback to English-language learners. This unique functionality, combined with the brand reputation and marketing resources that Cambridge University brings to the joint venture, provides a significant opportunity for Write & Improve and our related products to become the ELT solution of choice for English-language learners.

We do not believe that automated assessment will replace human teachers and examiners anytime soon, but it can add great value to their work. For example, it can provide additional layers of quality control, speed up processes and allow teachers to offer more objective in-course tests which give detailed diagnostic feedback to help students to improve their English more effectively.
Nick Saville, Director Research & Validation at Cambridge English

Ted Briscoe & ALTA.

Key research that underpins ELiT has been led by Professor Ted Briscoe and his team at Cambridge University’s Institute for Automated Language Teaching and Assessment (ALTA) which focuses on research in computer systems and platforms, corpus linguistics, computational linguistics, speech processing and machine learning. The multi-disciplinary team brings together experts in computing, engineering, linguistics and language assessment to investigate new ways of using technology to enhance language learning and to develop cutting-edge approaches to assessment which will benefit learners and teachers worldwide. It forms part of Cambridge University’s interdisciplinary Language Sciences Initiative.

ALTA

iLexIR

iLexIR is also a key partner to ELiT. Through their experts in natural language processing (NLP), computational linguistics, and its applications, iLexIR harnesses the cutting-edge research that comes from ALTA and delivers the viable solutions that ELiT then develops into products.

iLexIR

Cambridge Assessment English

ELiT is also working in close partnership with practitioners at Cambridge Assessment English who already have extensive experience in using technology to support language learning, including the multi-million-word Cambridge Learner Corpus which is a uniquely extensive database of learners’ English which is used to enhance Cambridge English exams and learning materials. Huge advances in areas like speech recognition and machine learning mean that computers can now complement the work of human assessors, giving surprisingly accurate evaluations of language and helping to diagnose areas for improvement.

Cambridge English