CLSP Spring Seminar Series: Becky Passonneau

Description

Becky Passonneau, a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Penn State University, will give a talk titled "Automated Support to Scaffold Students' Short- and Long-form STEM Writing" for the Center for Language and Speech Processing.

Abstract:

Automated analysis of student writing has the potential to provide alternatives to selected-response questions such as multiple choice and to enable teachers and instructors to assess students' reasoning skills based on their long-form writing. Further, automated support to assess both short answers and long passages could provide students with a smoother trajectory towards mastery of written communication. Our methods focus on the specific ideas students express to support formative assessment through different kinds of feedback, which aims to scaffold their abilities to reason and communicate. In this talk, I review our work in the Natural Language Processing Lab at Penn State University on methods for automated assessment of different forms of student writing, from younger and older students. I will briefly illustrate highly curated datasets created in collaboration with researchers in STEM education, results from deployment of an older content analysis tool on middle school physics essays, and very preliminary results on assessment of college students' physics lab reports. I will also present our current work on short answer assessment using a novel recurrent relation network that incorporates contrastive learning.