News

February 2023: Yuya Asano is part of the team from Pitt in Amazon’s Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge 2! Read more in Pittwire.

October 2022: Best Paper Award at the 9th ArgMining Workshop (at COLING) to Zhexiong Liu, Meiqi Guo, Yue Dai, and Diane Litman!

April 2022: Tazin Afrin defends her dissertation!

December 2021: Invited talk at JamesFest

November 2021: Mingzhi Yu defends her dissertation!

April 2021: Haoran Zhang at Commencement!

June 2021: Best Paper Award at Workshop for Undergraduates in Educational Data Mining and Learning Engineering (at EDM) to Sonia Cromp and Diane Litman

Feb 2021: Mingzhi’s defense proposal (Linguistic Entrainment in Human-to-Human Dialogue and its application in End-to-End Dialogue Systems) is scheduled for Feburary 26th !

October 2020 2 accepted papers at COLING 2020. A system demo of the Discussion Tracker App and Contextual Argument Component Classification.

July 2020 CourseMirror Student Reflection data with abstractive human annotation is publicly available.

July 2020 Prof. Litman as Keynote Speaker, 21st Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL)

May 2020 DiscussionTracker Corpus (classroom talk annotated for argumentation, specificity, collaboration)

May 2020 Despite the lockdown, new lab member Magnolia (a Lambda Blade deep learning server) arrived and is running!

Summer 2020 Internships: Ahmed, Microsoft Mingzhi, Microsoft

March 2020 Prof. Litman receives Provost’s Doctoral Mentoring Award

December 2019 Prof. Litman featured in What will the 2020s Bring for AI?

November 2019 Update to Teams Corpus (multi-party audio now with dialogue transcripts and self-report performance measures)

October 2019 Prof. Litman as Panelist, AI in Education, German Mittelstand East Coast Industry Forum

October 2019 NSF grant awarded on collaborative argumentation

July 2019 LRDC internal grant on collaborative dialogue with a teachable robot

Summer 2019 Interships Mingzhi, Amazon; Luca, Ancestry; Haoran, Facebook; Ahmed, Microsoft

May 2019 Zahra Rahimi defends her dissertation!

October 2018 Prof. Litman featured in 39 women doing amazing research in computational social science

July 2018: IES and NSF grants (on summarization and collaborative argumentation, respectively)

Summer 2018 Interships: Zahra, Adobe; Mingzhi, Amazon; Ahmed, Analytic Measures Inc.; Haoran, Google X; Tazin, Philips Lighting Research; Luca, Showclix

May 2018 Prof. Litman invited to the AI for Good Global Summit organized by the United Nation’s ITU

February 2018 Prof. Litman as Panelist, Next Big Steps in AI for Education, 8th Symposium on Educational Advances in Artificial Intelligence

December 2017: Prof. Litman selected as Fellow, Association for Computational Linguistics

November 2017 First lab graduate Mihai returns

October 2017 Prof.Litman elected to the Executive Committee of the International Artificial Intelligence in Education Society

July 2017 “Entrainment in Multi-Party Spoken Dialogues at Multiple Linguistic Levels” shortlisted for an ISCA Best Student Paper Award at Interspeech

April 2017 Wencan Luo, Huy Nguyen, and Fan Zhang all defend their dissertations!