Research
My research is in the area of artificial intelligence, and includes contributions in the areas of artificial intelligence and education, computational linguistics, 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
- Using AI to Increase Fairness by Improving Access to Justice
Brief Biography
I am Professor of Computer Science, a Senior Scientist with the Learning Research and Development Center (LRDC), and Faculty 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.
News
- April 2021: Pitt Momentum Funds Teaming Grant for "Center for Text Analytic Methods in Legal Studies" (K. Ashley (PI), D. Litman, D. He, R. Hwa, J. Anderson (Co-PIs))
- 2021: Pitt Cyber Accelerator Grant for "Influence Detection through Multimodal Discourse and Vividness Analysis" (A. Kovashka (PI), D. Litman, R. Hwa, M. Alikhani, Y. Lin, T. Provins, J. Cohn (co-PIs))
- 2021: New Member (3-year term), ETS Visiting Panel on Research
- 2021: New Member, Advisory Board, Center for Integrative Research in Computing and Learning Science (CIRCLS)
- January 2021: New NSF grant awarded (on legal argumentation/summarization for fairness) (NSF Announcement)
- December 2020: Haoran Zhang defends his dissertation!
- November 2020: Recognized as an EMNLP 2020 Outstanding Reviewer
- September 2020: New NSF grant awarded (on social robots)
- July 2020: What do teachers want to see in automated writing evaluation systems?, eSchool News
- July 2020: Luca Lugini defends his dissertation!
- July 2020: Keynote Speaker, 21st Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL)
- July 2020: Summarizing Student Reflection Corpus (abstractive version) is now available for scientific purposes (download)
- Summer 2020: Top Computer Scientists (faculty who have an h-index of at least 40).
- March 2020: Provost's Doctoral Mentoring Award Recipient
- December 2019: 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) is available for scientific purposes (download)
- October 2019: Panelist, AI in Education, German Mittelstand East Coast Industry Forum
- 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
Editorial
- Associate Editor, International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education
- Editorial Board, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research
- Editorial Board, Argument and Computation
PCs (2021)
- 22nd Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education
- 16th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (at EACL)
- AAAI Spring Symposium on Artificial Intelligence for K-12 Education
- 1st Workshop on Document-grounded Dialogue and Conversational QA (ACL-IJCNLP)