HANGZHOU -- A university in East China's Zhejiang province has introduced artificial intelligence (AI) to correct the test papers on the Chinese language course for its students.

"It takes only 40 seconds for the AI to correct a Chinese essay," said a Chinese language professor at Zhejiang International Studies University.

Eleven overseas students from six countries including Russia, Republic of Korea and Zambia sat the final exam. Using different symbols, the AI corrector accurately marked for various errors, including redundancy, missing characters, incorrect selection and word order.

The AI corrector was developed by Chinese Internet giant Alibaba, which said its accuracy rate neared or even surpassed its human counterparts.

According to the developers, after converting the papers into digital texts with the help of optical character recognition technology, the AI, which had "learned" hundreds of thousands of Chinese linguistic data systems, was able to identify grammatical mistakes and mark them.

However, "it can only find language mistakes, and is unable to appreciate an essay in terms of vocabulary, sentence pattern or writing style," said Zhang Lu, a language professor at Renmin University.