MLRC Speaker Series: Promises and Pitfalls in Assessing Multilingual Learners’ Collaborative Dialog with AI-Supported Tools
Ananya Ganesh
Join Ananya Ganesh for her presentation of “Promises and Pitfalls in Assessing Multilingual Learners’ Collaborative Dialog with AI-Supported Tools” as part of the 2026–27 MLRC Speaker Series.
Small-group classroom problem-solving builds socio-cognitive skills such as shared meaning-making and negotiation. To support teachers in independent and productive group work, learning sciences research has examined automated machine-learning models that detect these skills through dialogue analysis. This presentation will address the limitations of existing frameworks, technological pipelines, and analytical tools for recognizing the contributions of multilingual learners. Ananya Ganesh will then explore areas where current AI tools excel and conclude with a discussion on addressing challenges and promising future directions.
Ananya Ganesh is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her research investigates how language technology can help learning scientists and educators derive actionable insights from classroom discourse. At UW–Madison, she works on building more representative datasets of linguistic variation in classrooms in collaboration with the Institute for Diversity Science and the Responsible AI for Learning Lab. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Colorado Boulder, where she developed new natural language processing techniques for educational dialog understanding in collaboration with the NSF-funded National AI Institute for Student-AI Teaming.
The MLRC Speaker Series highlights current research related to the teaching and learning of multilingual learners. Every first Thursday of the month, a researcher or team of researchers is invited to share insights, findings or learnings from their research. Recordings are posted within one week of the event.