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:20240328T184152Z 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-22374@www.clsp.jhu.edu DTSTAMP:20240328T184152Z CATEGORIES;LANGUAGE=en-US:Seminars CONTACT: DESCRIPTION:
Abstract
\nIn recent years\, the fiel d of Natural Language Processing has seen a profusion of tasks\, datasets\ , and systems that facilitate reasoning about real-world situations throug h language (e.g.\, RTE\, MNLI\, COMET). Such systems might\, for example\, be trained to consider a situation where “somebody dropped a glass on the floor\,” and conclude it is likely that “the glass shattered” as a result . In this talk\, I will discuss three pieces of work that revisit assumpti ons made by or about these systems. In the first work\, I develop a Defeas ible Inference task\, which enables a system to recognize when a prior ass umption it has made may no longer be true in light of new evidence it rece ives. The second work I will discuss revisits partial-input baselines\, wh ich have highlighted issues of spurious correlations in natural language r easoning datasets and led to unfavorable assumptions about models’ reasoni ng abilities. In particular\, I will discuss experiments that show models may still learn to reason in the presence of spurious dataset artifacts. F inally\, I will touch on work analyzing harmful assumptions made by reason ing models in the form of social stereotypes\, particularly in the case of free-form generative reasoning models.
\nBiography
\nRachel Rudinger is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Co mputer Science at the University of Maryland\, College Park. She holds joi nt appointments in the Department of Linguistics and the Institute for Adv anced Computer Studies (UMIACS). In 2019\, Rachel completed her Ph.D. in C omputer Science at Johns Hopkins University in the Center for Language and Speech Processing. From 2019-2020\, she was a Young Investigator at the A llen Institute for AI in Seattle\, and a visiting researcher at the Univer sity of Washington. Her research interests include computational semantics \, common-sense reasoning\, and issues of social bias and fairness in NLP.
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20220916T120000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20220916T131500 LOCATION:Hackerman Hall B17 @ 3400 N. Charles Street\, Baltimore\, MD 21218 SEQUENCE:0 SUMMARY:Rachel Rudinger (University of Maryland\, College Park) “Not So Fas t!: Revisiting Assumptions in (and about) Natural Language Reasoning” URL:https://www.clsp.jhu.edu/events/rachel-rudinger-university-of-maryland- college-park-not-so-fast-revisiting-assumptions-in-and-about-natural-langu age-reasoning/ X-COST-TYPE:free X-TAGS;LANGUAGE=en-US:2022\,Rudinger\,September END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR