School of Computer Science Colloquium Presentation by Dr. Fazel Keshtkar:"Speech Act Classification in Intelligent Tutoring Systems "

Date: Friday December 3, 2021 

Time: 11:00am – 12:30pm 

Passcode: If interested in attending this event, contact the Graduate Secretary at csgradinfo@uwindsor.ca with sufficient notice before the event to obtain the passcode.   

 

AutoMentor is an Intelligent Tutoring System for producing automated professional mentoring (called AutoMentor) as critical piece of technological infrastructure for a new, more motivating, and more inclusive approach to STEM education. 

 

In intelligent tutoring systems with natural language dialogue, speech act classification, the task of detecting learners’ intentions, informs the system’s response mechanism. In this talk, I explain our proposed supervised machine learning models for speech act classification in the context of an online collaborative learning game environment. I explain the role of context (i.e. speech acts of previous utterances) for speech act classification. I also compare speech act classification models trained and tested with contextual and non-contextual features (contents of the current utterance). The accuracy of the proposed models and other finding and  role of context in automatically predicting the speech acts. 

Dr. Fazel Keshtkar is an Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science, ST. JOHN'S University, NYC (SJU), since 2016. Before joining SJU, from 2013-2016, Dr. Keshtkar was an Assistant Professor at Dept. of Computer Science, Southeast Missouri State University. Fazel received his PhD and Master degrees in Computer Science from University of Ottawa, Canada, in 2011 and 2007, respectively.  

 

Dr. Keshtkar is co-chair in Flairs conference (https://www.flairs-35.info/) from 2020-2023. He also chair and organizes  ANLP (Applied Natural Language Proccessing) Special Track in Flairs conference since  2012: https://sites.google.com/view/flairs-anlp/anlp-2022 

 

Prior, Fazel spent more than two years (March 2011-Aug 2013) as a Research Scientist Fellow in the Institute for Intelligent Systems (IIS) at the University of Memphis working with Prof. Art Graesser in Intelligent Tutoring Systems. Dr. Keshtkar led in developing AutoMentor’s Natural Language Processing/Generation module and Question Generation for Epistemic Educational Game system.  

 

Dr. Keshtkar’s research interests span the fields of Artificial Intelligent (AI), Natural Language Processing and Generation (NLP/NLG), Computational Linguistics (CL), Machine Learning, and Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS).  

 

He served as an Committee Member for several international Conferences, such as the ACL/NNACL/EACL/Canadian-AI/FLIARS/QG/ITS/AIED/EDM on Natural Language Processing and ITS. He also is the author/co-author and reviewer of articles and papers in highly reputed journals and conferences. 

 

Please refer to my website if you need more info: https://sites.google.com/view/fazel/ 

 

 

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