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

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

Author: Katherine A. Keith, Naitian Zhou, & Lucy Li March 20, 2022 Duration: 50:26

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.


Behind every published paper or headline-grabbing finding using social data, there's a hidden story of collaboration, dead ends, and problem-solving. Diaries of Social Data Research pulls back the curtain on that process. Hosted by researchers Katherine A. Keith, Naitian Zhou, and Lucy Li, this series sits down with scholars working at the intersection of computational methods and social science to explore the real, human effort behind the datasets. Each conversation functions like an open research diary, detailing how interdisciplinary teams actually come together, navigate differing academic cultures, and tackle the practical hurdles of working with massive, often messy, information about human behavior. You'll hear about the stalled projects, the unexpected breakthroughs, and the meticulous work that turns a raw idea into a credible contribution. This isn't a podcast about polished results, but about the fascinating and often untold journey of modern research. For anyone curious about how we actually study society through data-the alliances built, the ethics debated, and the code debugged late into the night-this series offers a rare and authentic look inside the lab.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 20

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