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-20117@www.clsp.jhu.edu DTSTAMP:20240328T165753Z CATEGORIES;LANGUAGE=en-US:Seminars CONTACT: DESCRIPTION:Abstract\nNeural sequence generation systems oftentimes generat e sequences by searching for the most likely sequence under the learnt pro bability distribution. This assumes that the most likely sequence\, i.e. t he mode\, under such a model must also be the best sequence it has to offe r (often in a given context\, e.g. conditioned on a source sentence in tra nslation). Recent findings in neural machine translation (NMT) show that t he true most likely sequence oftentimes is empty under many state-of-the-a rt NMT models. This follows a large list of other pathologies and biases o bserved in NMT and other sequence generation models: a length bias\, large r beams degrading performance\, exposure bias\, and many more. Many of the se works blame the probabilistic formulation of NMT or maximum likelihood estimation. We provide a different view on this: it is mode-seeking search \, e.g. beam search\, that introduces many of these pathologies and biases \, and such a decision rule is not suitable for the type of distributions learnt by NMT systems. We show that NMT models spread probability mass ove r many translations\, and that the most likely translation oftentimes is a rare event. We further show that translation distributions do capture imp ortant aspects of translation well in expectation. Therefore\, we advocate for decision rules that take into account the entire probability distribu tion and not just its mode. We provide one example of such a decision rule \, and show that this is a fruitful research direction.\nBiography\nI am a n assistant professor (UD) in natural language processing at the Institute for Logic\, Language and Computation where I lead the Probabilistic Langu age Learning group.\nMy work concerns the design of models and algorithms that learn to represent\, understand\, and generate language data. Example s of specific problems I am interested in include language modelling\, mac hine translation\, syntactic parsing\, textual entailment\, text classific ation\, and question answering.\nI also develop techniques to approach gen eral machine learning problems such as probabilistic inference\, gradient and density estimation.\nMy interests sit at the intersection of disciplin es such as statistics\, machine learning\, approximate inference\, global optimization\, formal languages\, and computational linguistics.\n \n DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20210419T120000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20210419T131500 LOCATION:via Zoom SEQUENCE:0 SUMMARY:Wilker Aziz (University of Amsterdam) “The Inadequacy of the Mode in Neural Machine Translation” URL:https://www.clsp.jhu.edu/events/wilker-aziz-university-of-amsterdam/ X-COST-TYPE:free X-ALT-DESC;FMTTYPE=text/html:\\n\\n
\\nAbstr act
\nNeural sequence generation systems oftentimes generat e sequences by searching for the most likely sequence under the learnt pro bability distribution. This assumes that the most likely sequence\, i.e. t he mode\, under such a model must also be the best sequence it has to offe r (often in a given context\, e.g. conditioned on a source sentence in tra nslation). Recent findings in neural machine translation (NMT) show that t he true most likely sequence oftentimes is empty under many state-of-the-a rt NMT models. This follows a large list of other pathologies and biases o bserved in NMT and other sequence generation models: a length bias\, large r beams degrading performance\, exposure bias\, and many more. Many of the se works blame the probabilistic formulation of NMT or maximum likelihood estimation. We provide a different view on this: it is mode-seeking search \, e.g. beam search\, that introduces many of these pathologies and biases \, and such a decision rule is not suitable for the type of distributions learnt by NMT systems. We show that NMT models spread probability mass ove r many translations\, and that the most likely translation oftentimes is a rare event. We further show that translation distributions do capture imp ortant aspects of translation well in expectation. Therefore\, we advocate for decision rules that take into account the entire probability distribu tion and not just its mode. We provide one example of such a decision rule \, and show that this is a fruitful research direction.
\nBi ography
\nI am an assistant professor (UD) in natu ral language processing at the Institute for Logic\, Language and Computation where I lead the Probabilistic Language Learning group.
\nMy work concerns the design of models and algorithms that learn to represe nt\, understand\, and generate language data. Examples of specific problem s I am interested in include language modelling\, machine translation\, sy ntactic parsing\, textual entailment\, text classification\, and question answering.
\nI also develop techniques to approach general machine l earning problems such as probabilistic inference\, gradient and density es timation.
\nMy interests sit at the intersection of disciplines such as statistics\, machine learning\, approximate inference\, global optimiz ation\, formal languages\, and computational linguistics.
\n\n< p> \n X-TAGS;LANGUAGE=en-US:2021\,April\,Aziz END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT UID:ai1ec-23505@www.clsp.jhu.edu DTSTAMP:20240328T165753Z CATEGORIES;LANGUAGE=en-US:Seminars CONTACT: DESCRIPTION:Abstract\nRecent advances in large pretrained language models h ave unlocked new exciting applications for Natural Language Generation for creative tasks\, such as lyrics or humour generation. In this talk we wil l discuss recent works by our team at Alexa AI and discuss current challen ges: (1) Pun understanding and generation: We release new datasets for pun understanding and the novel task of context-situated pun generation\, and demonstrate the value of our annotations for pun classification and gener ation tasks. (2) Song lyric generation: we design a hierarchical lyric gen eration framework that enables us to generate pleasantly-singable lyrics w ithout training on melody-lyric aligned data\, and show that our approach is competitive with strong baselines supervised on parallel data. (3) Crea te with Alexa: a multimodal story creation experience recently launched on Alexa devices\, which leverages story text generation models in tandem wi th story visualization and background music generation models to produce m ultimodal stories for kids.\nBiography\nAlessandra Cervone is an Applied S cientist in the Natural Understanding team at Amazon Alexa AI. Alessandra holds an MSc in Speech and Language Processing from University of Edinburg h and a PhD in CS from University of Trento (Italy). During her PhD\, Ales sandra worked on computational models of coherence in open-domain dialogue advised by Giuseppe Riccardi. In the first year of the PhD\, she was the team leader of one of the teams selected to compete in the first edition o f the Alexa Prize. More recently\, her research interests have been focuse d on natural language generation and its evaluation\, in particular in the context of creative AI applications. DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20230317T120000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20230317T131500 LOCATION:Hackerman Hall B17 @ 3400 N. Charles Street\, Baltimore\, MD 21218 SEQUENCE:0 SUMMARY:Alessandra Cervone (Amazon) “Controllable Text Generation for Creat ive Applications URL:https://www.clsp.jhu.edu/events/alexxandra-cervone-amazon/ X-COST-TYPE:free X-ALT-DESC;FMTTYPE=text/html:\\n\\n\\n
Abstr act
\nRecent advances in large pretrain ed language models have unlocked new exciting applications for Natural Lan guage Generation for creative tasks\, such as lyrics or humour generation. In this talk we will discuss recent works by our team at Alexa AI and dis cuss current challenges: (1) Pun understanding and generation: We release new datasets for pun understanding and the novel task of context-situated pun generation\, and demonstrate the value of our annotations for pun clas sification and generation tasks. (2) Song lyric generation: we design a hi erarchical lyric generation framework that enables us to generate pleasant ly-singable lyrics without training on melody-lyric aligned data\, and sho w that our approach is competitive with strong baselines supervised on par allel data. (3) Create with Alexa: a multimodal story creation experience recently launched on Alexa devices\, which leverages story text generation models in tandem with story visualization and background music generation models to produce multimodal stories for kids.
\nBiography< /strong>
\nAlessandra Cervone is an Applied Scientist in the Natural Understanding team at Amazon Alexa AI. Alessandra holds an MSc in Speech and Language Processing from University of Edinburgh and a PhD in CS from University of Trento (Italy). During her PhD\, Alessandra worked on comput ational models of coherence in open-domain dialogue advised by Giuseppe Ri ccardi. In the first year of the PhD\, she was the team leader of one of t he teams selected to compete in the first edition of the Alexa Prize. More recently\, her research interests have been focused on natural language g eneration and its evaluation\, in particular in the context of creative AI applications.
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