Invited Talk 1: Personalized Writing Learning Assistant using Natural Language Processing: Opportunities and Challenges

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown great promise in building various educational applications, improving learning experiences, and providing resources for both students and educators. According to Pew Research Center, one-in-five U.S. adults said they have used ChatGPT for learning by August 2023, and the trend continues to grow. In this talk, I will discuss our ongoing efforts on leveraging LLMs to build personalized argumentative writing assistants based on feedback giving. I will also present our recent work on building human-NLP collaborative tools to help educator create active learning opportunities at scale. Finally, I will highlight challenges associated with employing LLMs for educational support, as evidenced by our research findings. Specifically, I will discuss the issues and impacts of "hallucination" and outdated knowledge as well as the lack of complex reasoning abilities and creativity.