Diane J. Litman

CS LRDC
Department of Computer Science Learning Research & Development Ctr.
5105 Sennott Square 741 LRDC
210 South Bouquet Street 3939 O'Hara Street
University of Pittsburgh University of Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, PA 15260 Pittsburgh, PA 15260
(phone) 412-624-8838 (phone) 412-624-1261
(fax) 412-624-8854 (fax) 412-624-9149

Faculty: Intelligent Systems Program
Director: ITSPOKE lab
Co-PI: RIMAC and SWoRD projects

Research

My research is in the area of artificial intelligence, and includes contributions in the areas of artificial intelligence and education, computational linguistics, knowledge representation and reasoning, natural language learning, spoken language, and user modeling. My work has included both fundamental research and applied research resulting in technology transfer and patents, as summarized in my biographical sketch.

My most recent research has been in the area of Speech and Natural Language Technology for Educational Applications. Current projects include:

  • An Affect-Adaptive Spoken Dialogue System that Responds Based on User Model and Multiple Affective States
  • Keeping Instructors Well-informed in Computer-Supported Peer Review
  • Teaching Writing and Argumentation with AI-Supported Diagramming and Peer Review
  • Improving a Natural-language Tutoring System That Engages Students in Deep Reasoning Dialogues About Physics

    My research as aggregated by Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic Search.

    Selected Publications (by year)

  • 2003-present

    Dissertations Supervised

  • Hua Ai, Intelligent Systems, PhD 2009: User Simulation for Spoken Dialog System Develpment (now Research Scientist, Georgia Tech, School of Interactive Computing)
  • Min Chi, Intelligent Systems, PhD 2009: Do Micro-Level Tutorial Decisions Matter: Applying Reinforcement Learning To Induce Pedagogical Tutorial Tactics (now Postdoctoral Fellow, Stanford University)
  • Mihai Rotaru, Computer Science, PhD 2008: Applications of Discourse Structure for Spoken Dialogue Systems (now at Textkernel)
  • Arthur Ward, Intelligent Systems, PhD 2010: Reflection and Learning Robustness in a Natural Language Conceptual Physics Tutoring System (now Postdoctoral Research Associate, Department of Biomedical Informatics, University of Pittsburgh)

    • News

  • 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

    Teaching

  • CS 0441: Discrete Structures for Computer Science (Spring 2005, Fall 2006, Spring 2007, Spring 2010)
  • CS 1571: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence (Fall 2008)
  • CS 1573: Artificial Intelligence Application Development (Spring 2003, 2004)
  • CS 1590: Social Implications of Computing Technology (Spring 2012)
  • CS 2710 / ISSP 2160: Foundations of Artificial Intelligence (Fall 2006, 2009, 2010)
  • CS 2731 / ISSP 2230: Introduction to Natural Language Processing (Fall 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2011)
  • CS 3710 / ISSP 3565: Advanced Topics in Artificial Intelligence (Dialog Systems) (Spring 2002)
  • CS 3710 / ISSP 3565: Advanced Topics in Artificial Intelligence (Affective Spoken Dialogue Systems) (Spring 2006)
  • CS 3710 / ISSP 3565: Advanced Topics in Artificial Intelligence (Speech and Natural Language Processing for Educational Applications) (Spring 2009)

    2012 Activities

  • Senior Program Committee, North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics - Human Language Technologies (NAACL HLT)
  • Senior Program Committee, 11th International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS)
  • Program Committee, 13th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGdial)
  • Program Committee, The 7th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (NAACL-HLT Workshop)
  • Program Committee, Flairs25 - Special Track on Affective Computing
  • Program Committee, Student Research Workshop, North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics - Human Language Technologies (NAACL HLT)
  • Review Committee, 13th International Conference of the Internatioanl Speech Communication Association (INTERSPEECH)

    2011 Activities

  • Senior Program Committee, Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED)
  • Senior Program Committee, Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII)
  • Program Committee, The 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (ACL-HLT)
  • Program Committee, 12th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGdial)
  • Program Committee, Flairs24 - Special Track on Affective Computing
  • Program Committee, The 6th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (ACL-HLT Workshop)
  • Scientific Review Committee, INTERSPEECH
  • Scientific Review Committee, Workshop on Speech and Language Technology in Education (SLATE)

    • Brief Biography

    I am Professor of Computer Science, and a Senior Scientist with the Learning Research and Development Center (LRDC), at the University of Pittsburgh. I moved here from the Garden State (aka New Jersey), where from 1985-2001 I was a member of the Artificial Intelligence Principles Research Department, AT&T Labs - Research (formerly Bell Laboratories); From 1990-1992, I was also an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University. I received my Ph.D. and M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Rochester, and my A.B. in Mathematics and Computer Science from the College of William and Mary in Virginia. Here is my academic geneology.

    Some Personal Stuff

    Selected Older Publications (by topic)

  • Spoken Dialogue and Affect for Intelligent Tutoring Systems: Spoken dialogue is a natural and highly desirable form of student-computer interaction, which provides both opportunities and challenges to both dialogue-based tutoring systems, and to spoken language systems. The goal of my research is to wed spoken language technology with instructional technology, in order to promote learning gains by enhancing communication richness. For further details, see the ITSPOKE webpage, which contains information on the ITSPOKE system and corpora, as well as information on the back-end (Why2, a text-based tutoring system in the domain of qualitative physics).

  • Exceptionality and Natural Language Learning: Previous work has shown that when machine learning is applied to many natural language processing tasks, exceptional training examples play an important role in improving generalization accuracy. We are exploring whether such results generalize to spoken dialogue, and how different formalizations of "exceptionality" impact the performance of memory-based and rule-based learning algorithms. Click for further details and online publications.

  • Question Answering: The development of resources for extending the current automatic question-answering paradigm to hande opinion-oriented, rather than fact-oriented, questions. Also, the use of ensemble methods to combine the output of multiple QA systems to improve performance, in the reading comprehension domain. Click for further details and online publications.

  • Spoken Dialogue for CHAT: The design, implementation, and empirical experiences of CobotDS, a spoken dialogue system for accessing the LambdaMoo text-based chat environment. CobotDS allows phone users to talk with LambdaMoo users via Cobot, a software agent residing in LambdaMOO. Click for further details and online publications.

  • Reinforcement Learning for Optimizing Spoken Dialogue Agents: The use of reinforcement learning to analyze and optimize dialogue strategy design in spoken dialogue systems. An empirical evaluation of an automatically optimized dialogue manager. Click for further details and online publications.

  • Prosodic Analysis of Misrecognitions and Corrections in Spoken Dialogue: Analytic and machine learning results indicating how prosodic differences can predict misrecognized vs. correctly recognized turns, and correction vs. other types of utterances. Click for further details and online publications.

  • Learning how to Predict Problematic Dialogue Situations, and an Application to Adaptive Spoken Dialogue: The use of rule induction to predict problematic dialogue situations (e.g. poor speech recognition, "bail out" situations where a caller should be transferred to a human operator). The design and evaluation of a spoken dialogue system that adapts its behavior when problematic situations are detected. Click for further details and online publications.

  • Evaluating Spoken Dialogue Agents: The PARADISE (PARAdigm for DIalogue System Evaluation) framework for empirically deriving an objective performance function, and PARADISE evaluations of cooperative responses, the use of tutorial dialogues, and adaptable dialogue behavior. Click for further details and online publications.

  • Device Representation and Reasoning with Affective Relations, and an Implementation in R++: An approach to monitoring and diagnosis of complex systems that integrates classical model-based diagnosis and heuristic expert systems. Implemented using R++, an extension of C++ that incorporates rules into the object-oriented paradigm. Click for further details, and online publications.

  • Terminological Reasoning with Plans and an Application to Plan Recognition: A plan-based knowledge representation system that integrates description logics with metric and qualitative temporal constraint languages, and a companion plan recognition system (T-REX) that uses the plan-based description logic. CLASP is an alternative plan-based knowledge representation system that extends description logics to handle temporal information by representing plans as regular expressions. Click for further details and online publications.

  • A Corpus-Based Approach to Classifying Discourse Segment Boundaries and Cue Phrases in Text and Speech: Empirical discourse analysis, with an emphasis on coding of data, the use of machine learning for hypothesis formation, and quantitative evaluation of results. Click for further details and online publications.

  • Plan Recognition: The use of plan recognition in both natural language dialogue systems and in intelligent graphical interfaces. Click for further details and online publications.

    • Offices

  • Past Chair, North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) , 2004-2005
  • International Advisory Committee for the ACL's Special Interest Group on Natural Language Learning (SIGNLL), 2003-present
  • Advisory Board, UM Inc., 2002-present

    Memberships

  • American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)
  • Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) (also SIGDIAL, SIGGEN, SIGNLL)
  • International Artificial Intelligence in Education Society (AIED)
  • International Speech Communication Association (ISCA)
  • Provost's Advisory Committee on Women's Concerns at the University of Pittsburgh (2002-2005)
  • American Daffodil Society
    December 2008
    litman at cs dot pitt dot edu