The NLP Group at Penn State

  Congratulations, Vipul, on passing his comprehensive exam, and  delivering an impressive  presentation  on "Responsible AI: Towards Equitable Model Evaluation" ! Here’s to his continued success and the amazing accomplishments that surely lie ahead in his PhD journey!

  ChatGPT Congratulations to Zhaohui Li on the remarkable achievement of graduating with a doctorate and successfully defending the dissertation! To celebrate this momentous occasion, family and colleagues gathered to honor Zhaohui's accomplishments and to toast to the bright future that lies ahead. We are all incredibly proud of Zhaohui and look forward to seeing the continued success and contributions to the field. Well done, Dr. Li!

  The NLP lab team recently gathered at Becky's house for a casual get-together. It was a great mix of familiar faces and some fresh additions to the group. We had a good time chatting, exchanging NLP insights, and breaking the ice with our new lab colleagues. Becky's place offered an ideal setting for a laid-back evening, and it provided an excellent opportunity to socialize outside of our typical lab environment. Here's to more such gatherings in the future! 🎉🤝🏠

The "AI in Science Education" workshop hosted by this team of six aimed to introduce four teachers from Pennsylvania to the exciting world of artificial intelligence (AI) in education. Through engaging sessions, hands-on activities, and real-world examples, the teachers gained a deeper understanding of AI's potential to enhance student learning experiences.   During the 2023/23 academic year, the four teachers will be using science essay prompts in their instruction that we created during the workshop. They will send us their students’ essays that we will evaluate with our PyrEval content assessment software. We will meet with them again in the summer of 2024 for a follow-up workshop.

  First NLP lab party of 2023! An outdoor event in which some of the older lab members get to hang out with the new members, discuss and share their ideas. And also, eat some delicious snacks!

Maryam Zare (NLP Ph.D. Penn State) has a 2022 EMNLP paper based on her thesis: "A POMDP Dialogue Policy with 3-way Grounding and Adaptive Sensing for Learning through Communication " .  Maryam, who has been at Apple since her graduation in August 2021, developed a single dialogue policy for an artificial agent to learn board games from people through multimodal dialogue interaction. It adapts its questions to its evolving perception of how informative the current dialogue partner is, and it can continue learning across dialogues.

The NLP Lab's recent contributions to a collaboration with University of  Wisconsin's Center for Education Research  are featured in an October 2022 article in the PSU Engineering News.  The article describes two recent publications leading to deployment of our content assessment software,  PyrEval , in middle school classrooms in Wisconsin for assessment of students' understanding of physics ideas.