The NLP Group at Penn State

  The NLP Lab has joined the efforts of several  EECS  departments to contribute to the  State College Area School District CEEL (Community Education Extended Learning) Program, an afterschool program with a focus on extending learning for students in grades K-5.  We contributed a CEEL unit called " Artificial Agents that Help Teachers Help Students in STEM Writing Activities ." Our unit presents an introduction to the ideas motivating our new NSF Award, " Supporting Science Learning and Teaching in Middle School Classrooms through Automated Analysis of Students' Writing " (in collaboration with Sadhana Puntambekar, U Wis, Madison.  It explains why good science writing goes hand in hand with good science, why teachers and students struggle with science writing, and how NLP can help. It gives a simple introductory lesson in distributional semantics, with activities for the students. You can find our unit on the  EECS CEEL  page, which has a downloa...

We have an  announcement about a new project funded by NSF!  Becky Passonneau has a new 4-year  NSF project  on automated analysis of middle school students' STEM writing, as of 08/01/2020. This project is a collaboration among one of the leaders in the field of learning design,  Sadhana Puntambekar ,  Becky Passonneau  as a leader in the field of natural language processing technology applied to education, and  ChanMin Kim  (PSU, Education), a leader in the interface between learning design and educational technology.  The project will develop a collaborative "Writer's Notebook" for teaching middle school science, for use interactively in the classroom by students and teachers.  Scientific writing skills are an important part of communicating about science, and learning new science concepts. The Writers Notebook will be used in several middle schools in Wisconsin. The component piece of the Writers Notebook developed at PSU for ana...

A recent paper on pyramid summarization evaluation, " Automated Pyramid Summarization Evaluation " has appeared in CoNLL 2019, with Yanjun giving a presentation on Hongkong, Nov 3, 2019. This paper presents a new software package, PyrEval, to evaluate machine and human summarization and is proved to be accurate and efficient. You can find more information about this paper on github as well. The pyramid method is known to be NP-complete and a challenging problem due to linguistic and content complexity. This work proposes a novel set partition algorithm that allocates clause-like units to summary content units, with two variants that generate equally good pyramids.  PyrEval could be used in many scenarios, including educational applications (see BEA paper), multi-lingual summarization evaluation (a recent LREC paper has applied PyrEval in German text summarization evaluation, link will be released soon).  This paper also received posit...

Joint CSE/IST NLP Colloquium just had the second speaker in the fall semester, Professor Karthik Narasimhan from Princeton, with his talk, "Addressing Long-Term Dependencies for Language Generation"! Professor Rebecca J Passonneau is introducing the speaker Professor Karthik Narasimhan is giving the talk  Like previous years, we had great audiences coming with questions! Two more talks are coming on: October 25th, Prof. Kathleen McKeown, Columbia University, "Where Natural Language Processing Meets Societal Needs". December 13th, Prof.Mona Diab, Columbia University, title TBD. The colloquium is hosted by Professor Rebecca J Passonneau (CSE), Prof.Kenneth Ting-hao Huang, Prof.Shomir Wilson (both from IST). We are looking forward to seeing you in the audience!

Ready for the new semester? Joint CSE/IST NLP Colloquium Fall 2019 is happening with exciting talks! On September 27, we just had the first speaker, Elijah Mayfield, Entrepreneur-In-Residence from Carnegie Mellon University, giving his talk, "Explainable Humans: Algorithmic Decision-Making and Education Policy". Dr.Passonneau is giving the opening speech  Elijah Mayfield is presenting his talk  Cybertorium is almost full! With two members of NLP Lab: Yanjun Gao and Zhaohui Li, in Penn State Campus More talks are lining up! Save the dates:  October 11th, Prof. Karthik Narasimhan, Princeton University  October 25th, Prof. Kathleen McKeown, Columbia University  December 4th, Prof. Mona Diab, Columbia University  This year, the talks are hosted by Dr. Rebecca Passonneau (CSE), Dr. Shomir Wilson (IST), and Dr.  Kenneth Ting-hao Huang (IST).  Please see our website:  PSU NLP Lab  for more details! W...

Two years in a row, Yanjun Gao is presenting her work at the Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications!

Keep an eye out this August for Maryam's presentation at GAMNLP-19!