Archived News
October 2022: Best Paper Award at 9th
Workshop on Argument Mining (at Coling) for
"ImageArg: A Multi-modal Tweet Dataset for Image Persuasiveness Mining
Data Augmentation for Improving the Prediction of Validity and Novelty
of Argumentative Conclusions"
by Zhexiong Liu, Meiqi Guo, Yue Dai, and Diane Litman.
October 2022: NSF interdisciplinary
Convergence Accelerator on Transforming Educational Technology Through
Convergence. I'll be collaborating with my fellow
assessment enthusiasts alongside colleagues from math and data science
to develop ideas that transform edtech.
February-August 2022: Digital Futures
`Scholar-in-Residence,' KTH Royal Institute of Technology
July 2022: James Chen Best Student Paper Award at UMAP2022 for
"How to Ask for Donations? Learning User-Specific Persuasive Dialogue
Policies through Online Interactions"
by Nhat Tran, Malihe Alikhani, and Diane Litman.
June 2022: Our team was one of the 30 winners
selected from this year's Learning Engineering Tools Competition on the
Learning
Science Research Track! SOE article.
June 2022:
New NSF
grant awarded (on NLP for improving writing revision)
April 2022: Tazin Afrin defends her dissertation!
March 2022: Ahmed Magooda defends his dissertation!
December 2021: Invited Talk, JamesFest
November 2021: Mingzhi Yu defends her dissertation!
November 2021:
AI Tools Help Increase Access to Justice
November 2021: Invited Talk,
AAAI Fall Symposium on Computational Theory of Mind for Human-Machine Teams
June 2021:
Best Paper Award at Workshop for Undergraduates in Educational Data Mining and
Learning Engineering (at EDM) for
"Essay Revision and Corresponding Grade Change as Captured by Text
Similarity and Revision Purposes"
by Sonia Cromp and Diane Litman
April 2021:
Panelist,
New Challenges for Educational Technology in the Time of the Pandemic,
16th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational
Applications
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 (through 2025),
University of Rochester Goergen Institute for Data
Science External Advisory Committee
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)
May 2018: Invitee,
AI
for Good Global Summit organized by the United Nation's ITU
February 2018: Panelist, Next Big Steps in AI for Education,
8th Symposium on Educational Advances in Artificial Intelligence
December 2017: Selected as
Fellow, Association for Computational Linguistics
October 2017: Elected to the Executive Committee of the
International Artificial Intelligence in
Education Society
August 2017: ArgRewrite Corpus (annotated
revisions for studying argumentative writing) is now available
for scientific purposes (download)
April 2017: Wencan Luo, Huy Nguyen, and Fan
Zhang all defend their dissertations! (commencement)
January 2017: Member of LRDC delegation to NERCEL, Wuhan, China
November 2016: Teams Corpus (multi-party and multi-modal dialogue entrainment) is now available
for scientific
purposes (download)
November 2016: Invited
panelist
at
AI
XPRIZE
+ Pittsburgh's AI Experts
November 2016: Invited speaker at NSF-supported EMNLP
workshop on
Uphill
Battles in Language Processing: Scaling Early
Achievements
to Robust Methods
Fall 2015: Shaw Visiting professor, Computer Science Department, National University of Singapore
August 2015: Elected to 3 year term as Councilor, Association for the
Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
August 2015: Summarizing Student Reflection Corpus is now available
for scientific purposes (download)
January-April 2015: Derek Brewer Visiting
Fellow, Emmanuel College, Cambridge University
December 2014: Michael Lipschultz defends his dissertation!
September 2014: ISCA Best Paper Published in Speech Communication (2011-2013) for
"Benefits and challenges of real-time uncertainty detection and
adaptation in a spoken dialogue computer tutor" (with
K. Forbes-Riley)
September 2014: Keynote Speaker, Fifth International
Conference on Computational Models of Argument
August 2014: Wenting Xiong defends her dissertation!
May 2014:
Royal Academy
of Engineering Distinguished Visiting Fellowship Award
May 2014: Invited Speaker,
Computational Linguistics and Educational Technology
Winter 2014:
Google Faculty Research Award
(Natural
Language Processing) (Pitt Chronicle listing)
September 2013: CS Department Teaching Award, graduate
seminar category
September 2013: Invited Speaker, Cambridge English Centenary Symposium on Speaking Assessment
August 2013: Keynote Speaker,
SLaTe Workshop (Speech & Language Technology in Education)
May 2013:
LRDC turns 50 (see Today section)
July 2012: Keynote Speaker,
13th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue (video)
Summer 2011: Pitt
Magazine features NLP faculty!
August 2011: Awarded
Senior
Member status by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial
Intelligence (AAAI and Pitt announcements)
March 2011: U. of Pittsburgh participant in IBM Watson comes to Pitt and CMU;
Pitt Panel;
IBM Interview
and CMU Q/A;
Converge article
June 2010: Art Ward
(6/23/10) defends his dissertation!
June 2010: Best Paper Award at
the 10th International Conference
on Intelligent Tutoring Systems for
Do Micro-Level Tutorial Decisions Matter: Applying Reinforcement
Learning to Induce Pedagogical Tutorial Tactics (by
Chi, VanLehn and Litman)
November 2009:
University Times
and School of Arts and Sciences on latest NSF award
September 2008 - November 2009: Mihai Rotaru (9/11/08), Hua Ai (9/21/09), and Min Chi (11/20/09) defend their dissertations!
June 2008: Uncertainty Corpus
is now available for scientific purposes through the Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center's Datashop
Aug. 2007 - July 2008: Leverhulme
Visiting Professor, University of Edinburgh
(Informatics).
Here is my UK Leverhulme Lecture series.
April 2008: Invited Speaker, Affective Language in Human and Machine Symposium of the AISB Convention
February 2008: Distinguished Lecturer, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh.
June 2007: U. of Pittsburgh Exhibitor, Coalition for
National Science Funding, Capitol Hill.
April 2007: Best Paper Award (Late-Breaking News) at HLT-NAACL
2007 for Exploring
Affect-Context Dependencies for Adaptive System Development
by Forbes-Riley, Rotaru, Litman, and Tetreault
September 2006:
People's Choice Best Paper Award for Discourse Structure and Speech Recognition Problems (by Mihai Rotaru and Diane Litman), Ninth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (Interspeech/ICSLP), 2006
July 2006: Invited Speaker at 7th SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue
June 2006: Keynote Speaker at Human Language Technology Conference/North American chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics Annual Meeting (ppt)
September 2005: Speech Communications Best Paper Award 2003-2004 was given
by the European Association for Signal Processing (Eurasip) for
"Prosodic and other cues to speech recognition failures" by Hirschberg,
Litman and Swerts
June 2004: Teaching
Computers to Teach Like Humans, Pitt Chronicle