BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:-//128.220.36.25//NONSGML kigkonsult.se iCalcreator 2.26.9// CALSCALE:GREGORIAN METHOD:PUBLISH X-FROM-URL:https://www.clsp.jhu.edu X-WR-TIMEZONE:America/New_York BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:America/New_York X-LIC-LOCATION:America/New_York BEGIN:STANDARD DTSTART:20231105T020000 TZOFFSETFROM:-0400 TZOFFSETTO:-0500 RDATE:20241103T020000 TZNAME:EST END:STANDARD BEGIN:DAYLIGHT DTSTART:20240310T020000 TZOFFSETFROM:-0500 TZOFFSETTO:-0400 RDATE:20250309T020000 TZNAME:EDT END:DAYLIGHT END:VTIMEZONE BEGIN:VEVENT UID:ai1ec-20987@www.clsp.jhu.edu DTSTAMP:20240329T092132Z CATEGORIES;LANGUAGE=en-US:Seminars CONTACT: DESCRIPTION:
Abstract
\nWhile there is a vast amou nt of text written about nearly any topic\, this is often difficult for so meone unfamiliar with a specific field to understand. Automated text simpl ification aims to reduce the complexity of a document\, making it more com prehensible to a broader audience. Much of the research in this field has traditionally focused on simplification sub-tasks\, such as lexical\, synt actic\, or sentence-level simplification. However\, current systems strugg le to consistently produce high-quality simplifications. Phrase-based mode ls tend to make too many poor transformations\; on the other hand\, recent neural models\, while producing grammatical output\, often do not make al l needed changes to the original text. In this thesis\, I discuss novel ap proaches for improving lexical and sentence-level simplification systems. Regarding sentence simplification models\, after noting that encouraging d iversity at inference time leads to significant improvements\, I take a cl oser look at the idea of diversity and perform an exhaustive comparison of diverse decoding techniques on other generation tasks. I also discuss the limitations in the framing of current simplification tasks\, which preven t these models from yet being practically useful. Thus\, I also propose a retrieval-based reformulation of the problem. Specifically\, starting with a document\, I identify concepts critical to understanding its content\, and then retrieve documents relevant for each concept\, re-ranking them ba sed on the desired complexity level.
\nBiography
\nI’m a research scientist at the HLTCOE at Johns Hopkins University. My primary research interests are in language generati on\, diverse and constrained decoding\, and information retrieval. During my PhD I focused mainly on the task of text simplification\, and now am wo rking on formulating structured prediction problems as end-to-end generati on tasks. I received my PhD in July 2021 from the University of Pennsylvan ia with Chris Callison-Burch and Marianna Apidianaki.
\nDTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20211022T120000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20211022T131500 LOCATION:Hackerman Hall B17 @ 3400 N. Charles Street\, Baltimore\, MD 21218 SEQUENCE:0 SUMMARY:Reno Kriz (HLTCOE – JHU) “Towards a Practically Useful Text Simplif ication System” URL:https://www.clsp.jhu.edu/events/reno-kriz-hltcoe-jhu-towards-a-practica lly-useful-text-simplification-system/ X-COST-TYPE:free X-TAGS;LANGUAGE=en-US:2021\,Kriz\,October END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT UID:ai1ec-21489@www.clsp.jhu.edu DTSTAMP:20240329T092132Z CATEGORIES;LANGUAGE=en-US:Seminars CONTACT: DESCRIPTION:
Abstract
\nSince it is increasingly h arder to opt out from interacting with AI technology\, people demand that AI is capable of maintaining contracts such that it supports agency and ov ersight of people who are required to use it or who are affected by it. To help those people create a mental model about how to interact with AI sys tems\, I extend the underlying models to self-explain—predict the label/an swer and explain this prediction. In this talk\, I will present how to gen erate (1) free-text explanations given in plain English that immediately t ell users the gist of the reasoning\, and (2) contrastive explanations tha t help users understand how they could change the text to get another labe l.
\nBiography
\nAna Marasović is a postdocto ral researcher at the Allen Institute for AI (AI2) and the Paul G. Allen S chool of Computer Science & Engineering at University of Washington. Her r esearch interests broadly lie in the fields of natural language processing \, explainable AI\, and vision-and-language learning. Her projects are mot ivated by a unified goal: improve interaction and control of the NLP syste ms to help people make these systems do what they want with the confidence that they’re getting exactly what they need. Prior to joining AI2\, Ana o btained her PhD from Heidelberg University.
\nHow to pronounce my name: the first name is Ana like in Spanish\, i.e.\, with a long “a” like in “water”\; regarding the last name: “mara” as in actress mara wilso n + “so” + “veetch”.
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20220228T120000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20220228T131500 LOCATION:Ames Hall 234 - Presented Virtually Via Zoom https://wse.zoom.us/j /96735183473 @ 3400 N. Charles Street\, Baltimore\, MD 21218 SEQUENCE:0 SUMMARY:Ana Marasović (Allen Institute for AI & University of Washington) “ Self-Explaining for Intuitive Interaction with AI” URL:https://www.clsp.jhu.edu/events/ana-marasovic-allen-institute-for-ai-un iversity-of-washington-self-explaining-for-intuitive-interaction-with-ai/ X-COST-TYPE:free X-TAGS;LANGUAGE=en-US:2022\,February\,Marasovic END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR