Research
My research is in the area of artificial intelligence, and includes contributions in the areas of artificial intelligence and education, computational linguistics, knowledge representation and reasoning, spoken language, and user modeling. My work has included both fundamental research and applied research resulting in technology transfer and patents. My most recent research has been in the area of Speech and Natural Language Technology for Educational Applications. Currently funded projects include:
- (ArgRewrite) Development of Human Language Technologies to Improve Disciplinary Writing and Learning through Self-Regulated Revising
- (CourseMIRROR) Enhancing Undergraduate STEM Education by Integrating Mobile Learning Technologies with Natural Language Processing
- (Discussion Tracker) Development of Human Language Technologies to Improve the Teaching of Collaborative Argumentation in High School English Classrooms
- (eRevise) Response-to-Text Tasks to Assess Students' Use of Evidence and Organization in Writing: Using Natural Language Processing for Scoring Writing and Providing Feedback At-Scale
- Studying Collaborative Dialogue with a Teachable Robot in a Mathematics Domain
Brief Biography
I am Professor of Computer Science, a Senior Scientist with the Learning Research and Development Center (LRDC), and Faculty Co-Director of the Intelligent Systems Program (ISP), all at the University of Pittsburgh. I moved here from the Garden State (aka New Jersey), where from 1985-2001 I was a member of the Artificial Intelligence Principles Research Department, AT&T Labs - Research (formerly Bell Laboratories); From 1990-1992, I was also an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University. I received my Ph.D. and M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Rochester, and my A.B. in Mathematics and Computer Science from the College of William and Mary in Virginia. Here are my informal and more formal versions of my academic geneology.
Recent News
- October 2019: New NSF grant awarded (on collaborative argumentation)
- July 2019: LRDC internal grant awarded (on collaborative dialogue with a teachable robot)
- May 2019: Zahra Rahimi defends her dissertation! (the defense)
- October 2018: 39 women doing amazing research in computational social science, Pittwire
- July 2018: New IES and new NSF grants awarded (on summarization and collaborative argumentation, respectively)
- December 2017: Selected as Fellow, Association for Computational Linguistics
- Archived News
- PhD Students
- Data and Code
2019 Activities
- Scientific Committee, 20th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL)
- Program Committee, 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
- Program Committee, Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)
- Program Committee, Thirty-Third AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (Senior Member Track)
- Program Committee, 14th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA) (at ACL)
- Organizing Committee, 6th International Workshop on Argument Mining (at ACL)
- Scientific Committee, Tenth International Workshop on Spoken Dialog Systems Technology (IWSDS)
- Program Committee, Women and Underrepresented Minorities in NLP Workshop (WINLP) (at ACL)
- Advisory Committee, Young Researchers' Roundtable on Spoken Dialog Systems
Professor