The NLP Group at Penn State

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.

    Becky, Ruihao, Zhaohui, Berk and lovely Renno are enjoying the great view and nice weather On 10/09, we hiked for the first time this Fall to enjoy the weather and nice views. We hiked from Beaver Mills to Ralph's Majestic Vista of Allegheny Front Trail. It was a great social event as you can see from the pictures. Pretty good at Ralph's Majestic Vista

  Another NLP lab party! As a tradition, every year Dr. Passonneau invites all the NLP lab members to her house for students to get to know each other better as the school year begins. This year, the NLP lab party was an outdoor event with some grilled food!

  Our lab went to Shingleton Gap hiking trail which is just 10 minutes away. It was an adventurous and a fun trail. We got lost 2 times with no internet but thanks to Ruihao’s navigation skills using AllTrails app which ensured we were not lost for long. Chase, Zhaohui’s dog, ensured that we never took a long stop and completed our hike earlier than expected! Hiking is always fun!