16. Measuring Uptake in Classroom Conversations and Using NLP to Support Teachers with Dora Demszky

This episode features Dora Demszky, a PhD student in Linguistics at Stanford University. Dora works at the intersection of natural language processing and education. We discuss her ACL 2021 paper titled "Measuring Conversational Uptake: A Case Study on Student-Teacher Interactions", co-authored with Jing Liu, Zid Mancenido, Julie Cohen, Heather Hill, Dan Jurafsky, and Tatsunori Hashimoto. Dora's work is motivated by creating tools that are useful for educators, so her research is not only descriptive or predictive, but also applicable to classrooms. She talks about managing large interdisciplinary teams, approaching research with care, and working with actual teachers to annotate data.

Om Podcasten

Large-scale data has become a major component of research about human behavior and society. But how are interdisciplinary collaborations that use large-scale social data formed and maintained? What obstacles are encountered on the journey from idea conception to publication? In this podcast, we investigate these questions by probing the “research diaries” of scholars in computational social science and adjacent fields. We unmask the research process with the hope of normalizing the challenges of and increasing accessibility in academia. Music: Jon Gillick.