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-21259@www.clsp.jhu.edu DTSTAMP:20240328T195226Z CATEGORIES;LANGUAGE=en-US:Seminars CONTACT: DESCRIPTION:
Abstract
\nNatural language processin g has been revolutionized by neural networks\, which perform impressively well in applications such as machine translation and question answering. D espite their success\, neural networks still have some substantial shortco mings: Their internal workings are poorly understood\, and they are notori ously brittle\, failing on example types that are rare in their training d ata. In this talk\, I will use the unifying thread of hierarchical syntact ic structure to discuss approaches for addressing these shortcomings. Firs t\, I will argue for a new evaluation paradigm based on targeted\, hypothe sis-driven tests that better illuminate what models have learned\; using t his paradigm\, I will show that even state-of-the-art models sometimes fai l to recognize the hierarchical structure of language (e.g.\, to conclude that “The book on the table is blue” implies “The table is blue.”) Second\ , I will show how these behavioral failings can be explained through analy sis of models’ inductive biases and internal representations\, focusing on the puzzle of how neural networks represent discrete symbolic structure i n continuous vector space. I will close by showing how insights from these analyses can be used to make models more robust through approaches based on meta-learning\, structured architectures\, and data augmentation.
\nBiography
\nTom McCoy is a PhD candidate in the Department of Cognitive Science at Johns Hopkins University. As an undergr aduate\, he studied computational linguistics at Yale. His research combin es natural language processing\, cognitive science\, and machine learning to study how we can achieve robust generalization in models of language\, as this remains one of the main areas where current AI systems fall short. In particular\, he focuses on inductive biases and representations of lin guistic structure\, since these are two of the major components that deter mine how learners generalize to novel types of input.
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20220131T120000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20220131T131500 LOCATION:Ames Hall 234 @ 3400 N. Charles Street\, Baltimore\, MD 21218 SEQUENCE:0 SUMMARY:Tom McCoy (Johns Hopkins University) “Opening the Black Box of Deep Learning: Representations\, Inductive Biases\, and Robustness” URL:https://www.clsp.jhu.edu/events/tom-mccoy-johns-hopkins-university-open ing-the-black-box-of-deep-learning-representations-inductive-biases-and-ro bustness/ X-COST-TYPE:free X-TAGS;LANGUAGE=en-US:2022\,January\,McCoy END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT UID:ai1ec-22394@www.clsp.jhu.edu DTSTAMP:20240328T195226Z CATEGORIES;LANGUAGE=en-US:Seminars CONTACT: DESCRIPTION:Abstract
\nModel robustness and spurious correlations have received increasing atten tion in the NLP community\, both in methods and evaluation. The term “spur ious correlation” is overloaded though and can refer to any undesirable sh ortcuts learned by the model\, as judged by domain experts.
\nWhen designing mitigation algorithms\, we oft en (implicitly) assume that a spurious feature is irrelevant for predictio n. However\, many features in NLP (e.g. word overlap and negation) are not spurious in the sense that the background is spurious for classifying obj ects in an image. In contrast\, they carry important information that’s ne eded to make predictions by humans. In this talk\, we argue that it is mor e productive to characterize features in terms of their necessity and suff iciency for prediction. We then discuss the implications of this categoriz ation in representation\, learning\, and evaluation.
\nBiogr aphy
\nHe He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and the Center for Data Science at New York University. She obtained her PhD in Computer Science at the University of Maryland\, C ollege Park. Before joining NYU\, she spent a year at AWS AI and was a pos t-doc at Stanford University before that. She is interested in building ro bust and trustworthy NLP systems in human-centered settings. Her recent re search focus includes robust language understanding\, collaborative text g eneration\, and understanding capabilities and issues of large language mo dels.
\n DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20221014T120000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20221014T131500 LOCATION:Hackerman Hall B17 @ 3400 N. Charles Street\, Baltimore\, MD 21218 SEQUENCE:0 SUMMARY:He He (New York University) “What We Talk about When We Talk about Spurious Correlations in NLP” URL:https://www.clsp.jhu.edu/events/he-he-new-york-university/ X-COST-TYPE:free X-TAGS;LANGUAGE=en-US:2022\,He\,October END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR