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