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-21275@www.clsp.jhu.edu DTSTAMP:20240329T074940Z CATEGORIES;LANGUAGE=en-US:Student Seminars CONTACT: DESCRIPTION:Abstract\n\n\n\nAutomatic discovery of phone or word-like units is one of the core objectives in zero-resource speech processing. Recent attempts employ contrastive predictive coding (CPC)\, where the model lear ns representations by predicting the next frame given past context. Howeve r\, CPC only looks at the audio signal’s structure at the frame level. The speech structure exists beyond frame-level\, i.e.\, at phone level or eve n higher. We propose a segmental contrastive predictive coding (SCPC) fram ework to learn from the signal structure at both the frame and phone level s.\n\nSCPC is a hierarchical model with three stages trained in an end-to- end manner. In the first stage\, the model predicts future feature frames and extracts frame-level representation from the raw waveform. In the seco nd stage\, a differentiable boundary detector finds variable-length segmen ts. In the last stage\, the model predicts future segments to learn segmen t representations. Experiments show that our model outperforms existing ph one and word segmentation methods on TIMIT and Buckeye datasets. DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20220211T120000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20220211T131500 LOCATION:Ames Hall 234 @ 3400 N. Charles Street\, Baltimore\, MD 21218 SEQUENCE:0 SUMMARY:Student Seminar – Saurabhchand Bhati “Segmental Contrastive Predict ive Coding for Unsupervised Acoustic Segmentation” URL:https://www.clsp.jhu.edu/events/student-seminar-saurabhchand-bhati/ X-COST-TYPE:free X-ALT-DESC;FMTTYPE=text/html:\\n\\n
\\nAbstr act
\n\n\n\n\nAutomatic discovery of phone or word-like units is one of the core objectives in zero-resource speech processing. Recent attempts employ contrastive predictive coding (CPC)\, where the model learns repre sentations by predicting the next frame given past context. However\, CPC only looks at the audio signal’s structure at the frame level. The speech structure exists beyond frame-level\, i.e.\, at phone level or even higher . We propose a segmental contrastive predictive coding (SCPC) framework to learn from the signal structure at both the frame and phone levels.\n\n\nSCPC is a hierarchical mode l with three stages trained in an end-to-end manner. In the first stage\, the model predicts future feature frames and extracts frame-level represen tation from the raw waveform. In the second stage\, a differentiable bound ary detector finds variable-length segments. In the last stage\, the model predicts future segments to learn segment representations. Experiments sh ow that our model outperforms existing phone and word segmentation methods on TIMIT and Buckeye datasets.
Abstr act
\nDriven by the goal of eradicating language barriers o n a global scale\, machine translation has solidified itself as a key focu s of artificial intelligence research today. However\, such efforts have c oalesced around a small subset of languages\, leaving behind the vast majo rity of mostly low-resource languages. What does it take to break the 200 language barrier while ensuring safe\, high-quality results\, all while ke eping ethical considerations in mind? In this talk\, I introduce No Langua ge Left Behind\, an initiative to break language barriers for low-resource languages. In No Language Left Behind\, we took on the low-resource langu age translation challenge by first contextualizing the need for translatio n support through exploratory interviews with native speakers. Then\, we c reated datasets and models aimed at narrowing the performance gap between low and high-resource languages. We proposed multiple architectural and tr aining improvements to counteract overfitting while training on thousands of tasks. Critically\, we evaluated the performance of over 40\,000 differ ent translation directions using a human-translated benchmark\, Flores-200 \, and combined human evaluation with a novel toxicity benchmark covering all languages in Flores-200 to assess translation safety. Our model achiev es an improvement of 44% BLEU relative to the previous state-of-the-art\, laying important groundwork towards realizing a universal translation syst em in an open-source manner.
\nBiography
\nAngela is a research scientist at Meta AI Research in Ne w York\, focusing on supporting efforts in speech and language research. R ecent projects include No Language Left Behind (https://ai.facebook.com/research/no-language-left-be hind/) and Universal Speech Translation for Unwritten Languages (https://ai.facebook.com/blog/ai-translation -hokkien/). Before translation\, Angela previously focused on research in on-device models for NLP and computer vision and text generation.
\n\n X-TAGS;LANGUAGE=en-US:2022\,Fan\,November END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT UID:ai1ec-24507@www.clsp.jhu.edu DTSTAMP:20240329T074940Z CATEGORIES;LANGUAGE=en-US:Seminars CONTACT: DESCRIPTION:Abstract\nHistory repeats itself\, sometimes in a bad way. Prev enting natural or man-made disasters requires being aware of these pattern s and taking pre-emptive action to address and reduce them\, or ideally\, eliminate them. Emerging events\, such as the COVID pandemic and the Ukrai ne Crisis\, require a time-sensitive comprehensive understanding of the si tuation to allow for appropriate decision-making and effective action resp onse. Automated generation of situation reports can significantly reduce t he time\, effort\, and cost for domain experts when preparing their offici al human-curated reports. However\, AI research toward this goal has been very limited\, and no successful trials have yet been conducted to automat e such report generation and “what-if” disaster forecasting. Pre-existing natural language processing and information retrieval techniques are insuf ficient to identify\, locate\, and summarize important information\, and l ack detailed\, structured\, and strategic awareness. In this talk I will p resent SmartBook\, a novel framework that cannot be solved by large langua ge models alone\, to consume large volumes of multimodal multilingual news data and produce a structured situation report with multiple hypotheses ( claims) summarized and grounded with rich links to factual evidence throug h multimodal knowledge extraction\, claim detection\, fact checking\, misi nformation detection and factual error correction. Furthermore\, SmartBook can also serve as a novel news event simulator\, or an intelligent prophe tess. Given “What-if” conditions and dimensions elicited from a domain ex pert user concerning a disaster scenario\, SmartBook will induce schemas f rom historical events\, and automatically generate a complex event graph a long with a timeline of news articles that describe new simulated events a nd character-centric stories based on a new Λ-shaped attention mask that c an generate text with infinite length. By effectively simulating disaster scenarios in both event graph and natural language format\, we expect Smar tBook will greatly assist humanitarian workers and policymakers to exercis e reality checks\, and thus better prevent and respond to future disasters .\nBio\nHeng Ji is a professor at Computer Science Department\, and an aff iliated faculty member at Electrical and Computer Engineering Department a nd Coordinated Science Laboratory of University of Illinois Urbana-Champai gn. She is an Amazon Scholar. She is the Founding Director of Amazon-Illin ois Center on AI for Interactive Conversational Experiences (AICE). She re ceived her B.A. and M. A. in Computational Linguistics from Tsinghua Unive rsity\, and her M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from New York Universit y. Her research interests focus on Natural Language Processing\, especiall y on Multimedia Multilingual Information Extraction\, Knowledge-enhanced L arge Language Models\, Knowledge-driven Generation and Conversational AI. She was selected as a Young Scientist to attend the 6th World Laureates As sociation Forum\, and selected to participate in DARPA AI Forward in 2023. She was selected as “Young Scientist” and a member of the Global Future C ouncil on the Future of Computing by the World Economic Forum in 2016 and 2017. The awards she received include Women Leaders of Conversational AI ( Class of 2023) by Project Voice\, “AI’s 10 to Watch” Award by IEEE Intelli gent Systems in 2013\, NSF CAREER award in 2009\, PACLIC2012 Best paper ru nner-up\, “Best of ICDM2013” paper award\, “Best of SDM2013” paper award\, ACL2018 Best Demo paper nomination\, ACL2020 Best Demo Paper Award\, NAAC L2021 Best Demo Paper Award\, Google Research Award in 2009 and 2014\, IBM Watson Faculty Award in 2012 and 2014 and Bosch Research Award in 2014-20 18. She was invited to testify to the U.S. House Cybersecurity\, Data Anal ytics\, & IT Committee as an AI expert in 2023. She was invited by the Sec retary of the U.S. Air Force and AFRL to join Air Force Data Analytics Exp ert Panel to inform the Air Force Strategy 2030\, and invited to speak at the Federal Information Integrity R&D Interagency Working Group (IIRD IWG) briefing in 2023. She is the lead of many multi-institution projects and tasks\, including the U.S. ARL projects on information fusion and knowledg e networks construction\, DARPA ECOLE MIRACLE team\, DARPA KAIROS RESIN te am and DARPA DEFT Tinker Bell team. She has coordinated the NIST TAC Knowl edge Base Population task 2010-2022. She was the associate editor for IEEE /ACM Transaction on Audio\, Speech\, and Language Processing\, and served as the Program Committee Co-Chair of many conferences including NAACL-HLT2 018 and AACL-IJCNLP2022. She is elected as the North American Chapter of t he Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) secretary 2020-2023. Her research has been widely supported by the U.S. government agencies (DA RPA\, NSF\, DoE\, ARL\, IARPA\, AFRL\, DHS) and industry (Apple\, Amazon\, Google\, Facebook\, Bosch\, IBM\, Disney). DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20240405T120000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20240405T131500 LOCATION:Hackerman Hall B17 @ 3400 N. Charles Street\, Baltimore\, Maryland 21218 SEQUENCE:0 SUMMARY:Heng Ji (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) “SmartBook: an AI Prophetess for Disaster Reporting and Forecasting” URL:https://www.clsp.jhu.edu/events/heng-ji-university-of-illinois-urbana-c hampaign-smartbook-an-ai-prophetess-for-disaster-reporting-and-forecasting / X-COST-TYPE:free X-ALT-DESC;FMTTYPE=text/html:\\n\\n
\\nAbstr act
\nHistory repeats itself\, sometimes in a bad way. Prev enting natural or man-made disasters requires being aware of these pattern s and taking pre-emptive action to address and reduce them\, or ideally\, eliminate them. Emerging events\, such as the COVID pandemic and the Ukrai ne Crisis\, require a time-sensitive comprehensive understanding of the si tuation to allow for appropriate decision-making and effective action resp onse. Automated generation of situation reports can significantly reduce t he time\, effort\, and cost for domain experts when preparing their offici al human-curated reports. However\, AI research toward this goal has been very limited\, and no successful trials have yet been conducted to automat e such report generation and “what-if” disaster forecasting. Pre-existing natural language processing and information retrieval techniques are insuf ficient to identify\, locate\, and summarize important information\, and l ack detailed\, structured\, and strategic awareness. In this talk I will p resent SmartBook\, a novel framework that cannot be solved by large langua ge models alone\, to consume large volumes of multimodal multilingual news data and produce a structured situation report with multiple hypotheses ( claims) summarized and grounded with rich links to factual evidence throug h multimodal knowledge extraction\, claim detection\, fact checking\, misi nformation detection and factual error correction. Furthermore\, SmartBook can also serve as a novel news event simulator\, or an intelligent prophe tess. Given “What-if” conditions and dimensions elicited from a domain ex pert user concerning a disaster scenario\, SmartBook will induce schemas f rom historical events\, and automatically generate a complex event graph a long with a timeline of news articles that describe new simulated events a nd character-centric stories based on a new Λ-shaped attention mask that c an generate text with infinite length. By effectively simulating disaster scenarios in both event graph and natural language format\, we expect Smar tBook will greatly assist humanitarian workers and policymakers to exercis e reality checks\, and thus better prevent and respond to future disasters .
\nBio
\nHeng Ji is a professor at Computer Science Department\, and an affiliated faculty member at Electrical and Co mputer Engineering Department and Coordinated Science Laboratory of Univer sity of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She is an Amazon Scholar. She is the Fo unding Director of Amazon-Illinois Center on AI for Interactive Conversati onal Experiences (AICE). She received her B.A. and M. A. in Computational Linguistics from Tsinghua University\, and her M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from New York University. Her research interests focus on Natural Language Processing\, especially on Multimedia Multilingual Information Ex traction\, Knowledge-enhanced Large Language Models\, Knowledge-driven Gen eration and Conversational AI. She was selected as a Young Scientist to at tend the 6th World Laureates Association Forum\, and selected to participa te in DARPA AI Forward in 2023. She was selected as “Young Scientist” and a member of the Global Future Council on the Future of Computing by the Wo rld Economic Forum in 2016 and 2017. The awards she received include Women Leaders of Conversational AI (Class of 2023) by Project Voice\, “AI’s 10 to Watch” Award by IEEE Intelligent Systems in 2013\, NSF CAREER award in 2009\, PACLIC2012 Best paper runner-up\, “Best of ICDM2013” paper award\, “Best of SDM2013” paper award\, ACL2018 Best Demo paper nomination\, ACL20 20 Best Demo Paper Award\, NAACL2021 Best Demo Paper Award\, Google Resear ch Award in 2009 and 2014\, IBM Watson Faculty Award in 2012 and 2014 and Bosch Research Award in 2014-2018. She was invited to testify to the U.S. House Cybersecurity\, Data Analytics\, & IT Committee as an AI expert in 2 023. She was invited by the Secretary of the U.S. Air Force and AFRL to jo in Air Force Data Analytics Expert Panel to inform the Air Force Strategy 2030\, and invited to speak at the Federal Information Integrity R&D Inter agency Working Group (IIRD IWG) briefing in 2023. She is the lead of many multi-institution projects and tasks\, including the U.S. ARL projects on information fusion and knowledge networks construction\, DARPA ECOLE MIRAC LE team\, DARPA KAIROS RESIN team and DARPA DEFT Tinker Bell team. She has coordinated the NIST TAC Knowledge Base Population task 2010-2022. She wa s the associate editor for IEEE/ACM Transaction on Audio\, Speech\, and La nguage Processing\, and served as the Program Committee Co-Chair of many c onferences including NAACL-HLT2018 and AACL-IJCNLP2022. She is elected as the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistic s (NAACL) secretary 2020-2023. Her research has been widely supported by t he U.S. government agencies (DARPA\, NSF\, DoE\, ARL\, IARPA\, AFRL\, DHS) and industry (Apple\, Amazon\, Google\, Facebook\, Bosch\, IBM\, Disney).
\n X-TAGS;LANGUAGE=en-US:2024\,April\,Ji END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR