I am currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Computer Science at Bocconi University. I am fortunate to work with Prof. Dirk Hovy at Milan Natural Language Processing Group (MilaNLP Lab). I joined MilaNLP LAB for INTERGRATOR project to study demographic factors to language processing systems and their role of them in the future of Conversational AI.
I received my Ph.D. in Information Technology Engineering at Politecnico di Milano, where I was fortunate to be advised by Prof. Barbara Pernici and Prof. Paolo Paolini. I was also a research visitor at ETH Zurich at my last year of PhD.
My Ph.D. thesis was “A Scalable, Reconfigurable, and Adaptive Framework for Chatbots in Education”. During My Ph.D., I focused on adaptive conversational agents; in particular, I designed and developed highly configurable chatbots in education to support various actors with different demographics.
My research focuses on the intersection of NLP and human-computer interaction, with a special emphasis on educational applications. My research interests include conversational AI, adaptive learning systems, intelligent tutoring systems, and human-AI collaboration in educational settings.
(Rooein et al., BEA 2024) Beyond Flesch-Kincaid: Prompt-based Metrics Improve Difficulty Classification of Educational Texts link
Rooein, Donya, and Dirk Hovy. “Conversations as a Source for Teaching Scientific Concepts at Different Education Levels.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.10475 (2024).
Rooein, Donya, Amanda Cercas Curry, and Dirk Hovy. “Know Your Audience: Do LLMs Adapt to Different Age and Education Levels?.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2312.02065 (2023).
Rooein, D.; Paolini, P. and Pernici, B. (2022). Educational Chatbots: A Sustainable Approach for Customizable Conversations for Education. In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Computer Supported Education - Volume 1, ISBN 978-989-758-562-3, ISSN 2184-5026, pages 314-321.
Rooein, D., Bianchini, D., Leotta, F. et al. aCHAT-WF: Generating conversational agents for teaching business process models. Software System Model (2021). link.
Rooein, Donya, and Paolini. Paolo. “ Adaptive Conversations for Adaptive Learning: Sustainable Development of Educational Chatbots.” Position paper presented at CONVERSATIONS 2020 – the 4th International Workshop on Chatbot Research, an online virtual event hosted by the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, November 23-24.
Rooein, D. Paolini, P. (2021). Adaptive Conversations for Adaptive Learning TalkyTutors: sustainable chatbots as tutors. In T. Bastiaens (Ed.), Proceedings of EdMedia + Innovate Learning (pp. 1020-1029). United States: Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE). Retrieved July 27, 2021. Link.
Negri, V., Scuratti, D., Agresti, S., Rooein, D., Shankar, A. R., Marquez, J. L. F., … \& Pernici, B. (2020). Image-based Social Sensing: Combining AI and the Crowd to Mine Policy-Adherence Indicators from Twitter. ICSE-SEIS 2021: 92-101.
Donya Rooein. 2019. Data-Driven Edu Chatbots. In Companion Proceedings of The 2019 World Wide Web Conference (WWW ‘19), Ling Liu and Ryen White (Eds.). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 46-49. Link.