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-20716@www.clsp.jhu.edu DTSTAMP:20240328T103526Z CATEGORIES;LANGUAGE=en-US:Seminars CONTACT: DESCRIPTION:Abstract\nOver the last few years\, deep neural models have tak en over the field of natural language processing (NLP)\, brandishing great improvements on many of its sequence-level tasks. But the end-to-end natu re of these models makes it hard to figure out whether the way they repres ent individual words aligns with how language builds itself from the botto m up\, or how lexical changes in register and domain can affect the untest ed aspects of such representations.\nIn this talk\, I will present NYTWIT\ , a dataset created to challenge large language models at the lexical leve l\, tasking them with identification of processes leading to the formation of novel English words\, as well as with segmentation and recovery of the specific subclass of novel blends. I will then present XRayEmb\, a method which alleviates the hardships of processing these novelties by fitting a character-level encoder to the existing models’ subword tokenizers\; and conclude with a discussion of the drawbacks of current tokenizers’ vocabul ary creation schemes.\nBiography\nYuval Pinter is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev\, fo cusing on natural language processing. Yuval got his PhD at the Georgia In stitute of Technology School of Interactive Computing as a Bloomberg Data Science PhD Fellow. Before that\, he worked as a Research Engineer at Yaho o Labs and as a Computational Linguist at Ginger Software\, and obtained a n MA in Linguistics and a BSc in CS and Mathematics\, both from Tel Aviv U niversity. Yuval blogs (in Hebrew) about language matters on Dagesh Kal. DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20210910T120000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20210910T131500 LOCATION:Hackerman Hall B17 @ 3400 N. Charles Street\, Baltimore\, MD SEQUENCE:0 SUMMARY:Yuval Pinter (Ben-Gurion University – Virtual Visit) “Challenging a nd Adapting NLP Models to Lexical Phenomena” URL:https://www.clsp.jhu.edu/events/yuval-pinter/ X-COST-TYPE:free X-ALT-DESC;FMTTYPE=text/html:\\n\\n
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\nOver the last few years\, deep neural models have tak en over the field of natural language processing (NLP)\, brandishing great improvements on many of its sequence-level tasks. But the end-to-end natu re of these models makes it hard to figure out whether the way they repres ent individual words aligns with how language builds itself from the botto m up\, or how lexical changes in register and domain can affect the untest ed aspects of such representations.
\nIn this talk\, I will present NYTWIT\, a dataset created to challenge large language models at the lexic al level\, tasking them with identification of processes leading to the fo rmation of novel English words\, as well as with segmentation and recovery of the specific subclass of novel blends. I will then present XRayEmb\, a method which alleviates the hardships of processing these novelties by fi tting a character-level encoder to the existing models’ subword tokenizers \; and conclude with a discussion of the drawbacks of current tokenizers’ vocabulary creation schemes.
\nBiography
\nYuval Pinter
is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at Ben-Gurion
University of the Negev\, focusing on natural language processing. Yuval got his PhD at the Georgia Institute of Tec
hnology School of Interactive Computing as a Bloomberg Data Science PhD Fe
llow. Before that\, he worked as a Research Engineer at Yahoo Labs and as
a Computational Linguist at Ginger Software\, and obtained an MA in Lingui
stics and a BSc in CS and Mathematics\, both from Tel Aviv University.
Abstr act
\nText simplification aims to help audiences read and u nderstand a piece of text through lexical\, syntactic\, and discourse modi fications\, while remaining faithful to its central idea and meaning. Than ks to large-scale parallel corpora derived from Wikipedia and News\, much of modern-day text simplification research focuses on sentence simplificat ion\, transforming original\, more complex sentences into simplified versi ons. In this talk\, I present new frontiers that focus on discourse operat ions. First\, we consider the challenging task of simplifying highly techn ical language\, in our case\, medical texts. We introduce a new corpus of parallel texts in English comprising technical and lay summaries of all pu blished evidence pertaining to different clinical topics. We then propose a new metric to quantify stylistic differentiates between the two\, and mo dels for paragraph-level simplification. Second\, we present the first dat a-driven study of inserting elaborations and explanations during simplific ation\, and illustrate the richness and complexities of this phenomenon. p>\n
Biography
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\nRaytheon BBN participated in the IARPA MATERIAL progr am\, whose objective is to enable rapid development of language-independen t methods for cross-lingual information retrieval (CLIR). The challenging CLIR task of retrieving documents written (or spoken) in one language so t hat they satisfy an information need expressed in a different language is exacerbated by unique challenges posed by the MATERIAL program: limited tr aining data for automatic speech recognition and machine translation\, sca nt lexical resources\, non-standardized orthography\, etc. Furthermore\, t he format of the queries and the “Query-Weighted Value” performance measur e are non-standard and not previously studied in the IR community. In this talk\, we will describe the Raytheon BBN CLIR system\, which was successf ul at addressing the above challenges and unique characteristics of the pr ogram.
\nBiography
\nDamianos Karakos has been at Raytheon BBN for the past nine years\, wh ere he is currently a Senior Principal Engineer\, Research. Before that\, he was research faculty at Johns Hopkins University. He has worked on seve ral Government projects (e.g.\, DARPA GALE\, DARPA RATS\, IARPA BABEL\, IA RPA MATERIAL\, IARPA BETTER) and on a variety of HLT-related topics (e.g.\ , speech recognition\, speech activity detection\, keyword search\, inform ation retrieval). He has published more than 60 peer-reviewed papers. His research interests lie at the intersection of human language technology an d machine learning\, with an emphasis on statistical methods. He obtained a PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland\, College Park\, in 2002.
\n\n
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\nIn this talk\, I present a multipronged strategy for zero-shot cross-lingual Information Extraction\, that is the construction of an IE model for some target language\, given existing annotations exclu sively in some other language. This work is part of the JHU team’s effort under the IARPA BETTER program. I explore data augmentation techniques inc luding data projection and self-training\, and how different pretrained en coders impact them. We find through extensive experiments and extension of techniques that a combination of approaches\, both new and old\, leads to better performance than any one cross-lingual strategy in particular.
\nBiography
\nAbstr act
\nSocial media allows researchers to track societal and cultural changes over time based on language analysis tools. Many of thes e tools rely on statistical algorithms which need to be tuned to specific types of language. Recent studies have questioned the robustness of longit udinal analyses based on statistical methods due to issues of temporal bia s and semantic shift. To what extent are changes in semantics over time af fecting the reliability of longitudinal analyses? We examine this question through a case study: understanding shifts in mental health during the co urse of the COVID-19 pandemic. We demonstrate that a recently-introduced m ethod for measuring semantic shift may be used to proactively identify fai lure points of language-based models and improve predictive generalization over time. Ultimately\, we find that these analyses are critical to produ cing accurate longitudinal studies of social media.
\n X-TAGS;LANGUAGE=en-US:2022\,February\,Harrigian END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT UID:ai1ec-21277@www.clsp.jhu.edu DTSTAMP:20240328T103526Z CATEGORIES;LANGUAGE=en-US:Seminars CONTACT: DESCRIPTION:Abstract\nAs humans\, our understanding of language is grounded in a rich mental model about “how the world works” – that we learn throug h perception and interaction. We use this understanding to reason beyond w hat we literally observe or read\, imagining how situations might unfold i n the world. Machines today struggle at this kind of reasoning\, which lim its how they can communicate with humans.In my talk\, I will discuss three lines of work to bridge this gap between machines and humans. I will firs t discuss how we might measure grounded understanding. I will introduce a suite of approaches for constructing benchmarks\, using machines in the lo op to filter out spurious biases. Next\, I will introduce PIGLeT: a model that learns physical commonsense understanding by interacting with the wor ld through simulation\, using this knowledge to ground language. From an E nglish-language description of an event\, PIGLeT can anticipate how the wo rld state might change – outperforming text-only models that are orders of magnitude larger. Finally\, I will introduce MERLOT\, which learns about situations in the world by watching millions of YouTube videos with transc ribed speech. Through training objectives inspired by the developmental ps ychology idea of multimodal reentry\, MERLOT learns to fuse language\, vis ion\, and sound together into powerful representations.Together\, these di rections suggest a path forward for building machines that learn language rooted in the world.\nBiography\nRowan Zellers is a final year PhD candida te at the University of Washington in Computer Science & Engineering\, adv ised by Yejin Choi and Ali Farhadi. His research focuses on enabling machi nes to understand language\, vision\, sound\, and the world beyond these m odalities. He has been recognized through an NSF Graduate Fellowship and a NeurIPS 2021 outstanding paper award. His work has appeared in several me dia outlets\, including Wired\, the Washington Post\, and the New York Tim es. In the past\, he graduated from Harvey Mudd College with a B.S. in Com puter Science & Mathematics\, and has interned at the Allen Institute for AI. DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20220214T120000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20220214T131500 LOCATION:Ames Hall 234 - Presented Virtually Via Zoom https://wse.zoom.us/j /96735183473 @ 3400 N. Charles Street\, Baltimore\, MD 21218 SEQUENCE:0 SUMMARY:Rowan Zellers (University of Washington) ” Grounding Language by Se eing\, Hearing\, and Interacting” URL:https://www.clsp.jhu.edu/events/rowan-zellers-university-of-washington- grounding-language-by-seeing-hearing-and-interacting/ X-COST-TYPE:free X-ALT-DESC;FMTTYPE=text/html:\\n\\n\\nAbstr act
\nAs humans\, our understanding of language is grounded
in a rich mental model about “how the world works” – that we learn throug
h perception and interaction. We use this understanding to reason beyond w
hat we literally observe or read\, imagining how situations might unfold i
n the world. Machines today struggle at this kind of reasoning\, which lim
its how they can communicate with humans.
In my talk\, I will discuss three lines of work to bridge
this gap between machines and humans. I will first discuss how we might m
easure grounded understanding. I will introduce a suite of approaches for
constructing benchmarks\, using machines in the loop to filter out spuriou
s biases. Next\, I will introduce PIGLeT: a model that learns physical com
monsense understanding by interacting with the world through simulation\,
using this knowledge to ground language. From an English-language descript
ion of an event\, PIGLeT can anticipate how the world state might change –
outperforming text-only models that are orders of magnitude larger. Final
ly\, I will introduce MERLOT\, which learns about situations in the world
by watching millions of YouTube videos with transcribed speech. Through tr
aining objectives inspired by the developmental psychology idea of multimo
dal reentry\, MERLOT learns to fuse language\, vision\, and sound together
into powerful representations.
Together\, these directions suggest a path forward for building mac
hines that learn language rooted in the world.
Biography strong>
\nRowan Zellers is a final year PhD candidate at the Univers ity of Washington in Computer Science & Engineering\, advised by Yejin Cho i and Ali Farhadi. His research focuses on enabling machines to understand language\, vision\, sound\, and the world beyond these modalities. He has been recognized through an NSF Graduate Fellowship and a NeurIPS 2021 out standing paper award. His work has appeared in several media outlets\, inc luding Wired\, the Washington Post\, and the New York Times. In the past\, he graduated from Harvey Mudd College with a B.S. in Computer Science & M athematics\, and has interned at the Allen Institute for AI.
\n< /HTML> X-TAGS;LANGUAGE=en-US:2022\,February\,Zellers END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT UID:ai1ec-21280@www.clsp.jhu.edu DTSTAMP:20240328T103526Z CATEGORIES;LANGUAGE=en-US:Seminars CONTACT: DESCRIPTION:Abstract\nAs AI-driven language interfaces (such as chat-bots) become more integrated into our lives\, they need to become more versatile and reliable in their communication with human users. How can we make pro gress toward building more “general” models that are capable of understand ing a broader spectrum of language commands\, given practical constraints such as the limited availability of labeled data?\nIn this talk\, I will d escribe my research toward addressing this question along two dimensions o f generality. First I will discuss progress in “breadth” — models that add ress a wider variety of tasks and abilities\, drawing inspiration from exi sting statistical learning techniques such as multi-task learning. In part icular\, I will showcase a system that works well on several QA benchmarks \, resulting in state-of-the-art results on 10 benchmarks. Furthermore\, I will show its extension to tasks beyond QA (such as text generation or cl assification) that can be “defined” via natural language. In the second p art\, I will focus on progress in “depth” — models that can handle complex inputs such as compositional questions. I will introduce Text Modular Net works\, a general framework that casts problem-solving as natural language communication among simpler “modules.” Applying this framework to composi tional questions by leveraging discrete optimization and existing non-comp ositional closed-box QA models results in a model with strong empirical pe rformance on multiple complex QA benchmarks while providing human-readable reasoning.\nI will conclude with future research directions toward broade r NLP systems by addressing the limitations of the presented ideas and oth er missing elements needed to move toward more general-purpose interactive language understanding systems.\nBiography\nDaniel Khashabi is a postdoct oral researcher at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2)\, Seattle. Previously\, he completed his Ph.D. in Computer and Information Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania in 2019. His interests lie at t he intersection of artificial intelligence and natural language processing \, with a vision toward more general systems through unified algorithms an d theories. DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20220218T120000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20220218T131500 LOCATION:Ames Hall 234 - Presented Virtually Via Zoom https://wse.zoom.us/j /96735183473 @ 3400 N. Charles Street\, Baltimore\, MD 21218 SEQUENCE:0 SUMMARY:Daniel Khashabi (Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence) “The Quest Toward Generality in Natural Language Understanding” URL:https://www.clsp.jhu.edu/events/daniel-khashabi-allen-institute-for-art ificial-intelligence/ X-COST-TYPE:free X-ALT-DESC;FMTTYPE=text/html:\\n\\n\\nAbstr act
\nAs AI-driven language interfaces (such as c hat-bots) become more integrated into our lives\, they need to become more versatile and reliable in their communication with human users. How can w e make progress toward building more “general” models that are capable of understanding a broader spectrum of language commands\, given practical co nstraints such as the limited availability of labeled data?
\nIn this talk\, I will describe my research toward addressing this ques tion along two dimensions of generality. First I will discuss progress in “breadth” — models that address a wider variety of tasks and abilities\, d rawing inspiration from existing statistical learning techniques such as m ulti-task learning. In particular\, I will showcase a system that works we ll on several QA benchmarks\, resulting in state-of-the-art results on 10 benchmarks. Furthermore\, I will show its extension to tasks beyond QA (su ch as text generation or classification) that can be “defined” via natural language. In the second part\, I will focus on progress in “depth” — mod els that can handle complex inputs such as compositional questions. I will introduce Text Modular Networks\, a general framework that casts problem- solving as natural language communication among simpler “modules.” Applyin g this framework to compositional questions by leveraging discrete optimiz ation and existing non-compositional closed-box QA models results in a mod el with strong empirical performance on multiple complex QA benchmarks whi le providing human-readable reasoning.
\nI will conclude w ith future research directions toward broader NLP systems by addressing th e limitations of the presented ideas and other missing elements needed to move toward more general-purpose interactive language understanding system s.
\nBiography
\nDaniel Khashabi is a postdoctoral researcher at the Allen Institute for Artificia l Intelligence (AI2)\, Seattle. Previously\, he completed his Ph.D. in Com puter and Information Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania in 2019. His interests lie at the intersection of artificial intelligence and natur al language processing\, with a vision toward more general systems through unified algorithms and theories.
\n X-TAGS;LANGUAGE=en-US:2022\,February\,Khashabi END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT UID:ai1ec-21487@www.clsp.jhu.edu DTSTAMP:20240328T103526Z CATEGORIES;LANGUAGE=en-US:Seminars CONTACT: DESCRIPTION:Abstract\nEnormous amounts of ever-changing knowledge are avai lable online in diverse textual styles and diverse formats. Recent advance s in deep learning algorithms and large-scale datasets are spurring progre ss in many Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks\, including question an swering. Nevertheless\, these models cannot scale up when task-annotated t raining data are scarce. This talk presents my lab’s work toward building general-purpose models in NLP and how to systematically evaluate them. Fir st\, I present a general model for two known tasks of question answering i n English and multiple languages that are robust to small domain shifts. Then\, I show a meta-training approach that can solve a variety of NLP tas ks with only using a few examples and introduce a benchmark to evaluate cr oss-task generalization. Finally\, I discuss neuro-symbolic approaches to address more complex tasks by eliciting knowledge from structured data and language models.\n\nBiography\n\nHanna Hajishirzi is an Assistant Profess or in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the Un iversity of Washington and a Senior Research Manager at the Allen Institut e for AI. Her research spans different areas in NLP and AI\, focusing on d eveloping general-purpose machine learning algorithms that can solve many NLP tasks. Applications for these algorithms include question answering\, representation learning\, green AI\, knowledge extraction\, and conversati onal dialogue. Honors include the NSF CAREER Award\, Sloan Fellowship\, Al len Distinguished Investigator Award\, Intel rising star award\, best pape r and honorable mention awards\, and several industry research faculty awa rds. Hanna received her PhD from University of Illinois and spent a year a s a postdoc at Disney Research and CMU. DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20220225T120000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20220225T131500 LOCATION:Ames Hall 234 - Presented Virtually Via Zoom https://wse.zoom.us/j /96735183473 SEQUENCE:0 SUMMARY:Hanna Hajishirzi (University of Washington & Allen Institute for AI ) “Toward Robust\, Knowledge-Rich NLP” URL:https://www.clsp.jhu.edu/events/hanna-hajishirzi-university-of-washingt on-allen-institute-for-ai-toward-robust-knowledge-rich-nlp/ X-COST-TYPE:free X-ALT-DESC;FMTTYPE=text/html:\\n\\n\\nAbstr act
\nAbstr act
\nSince it is increasingly harder to opt out from inter acting with AI technology\, people demand that AI is capable of maintainin g contracts such that it supports agency and oversight of people who are r equired to use it or who are affected by it. To help those people create a mental model about how to interact with AI systems\, I extend the underly ing models to self-explain—predict the label/answer and explain this predi ction. In this talk\, I will present how to generate (1) free-text explana tions given in plain English that immediately tell users the gist of the r easoning\, and (2) contrastive explanations that help users understand how they could change the text to get another label.
\nBiograph y
\nAna Marasović is a postdoctoral researcher at the Allen Institute for AI (AI2) and the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at University of Washington. Her research interests broadly l ie in the fields of natural language processing\, explainable AI\, and vis ion-and-language learning. Her projects are motivated by a unified goal: i mprove interaction and control of the NLP systems to help people make thes e systems do what they want with the confidence that they’re getting exact ly what they need. Prior to joining AI2\, Ana obtained her PhD from Heidel berg University.
\nHow to pronounce my name: the first name i s Ana like in Spanish\, i.e.\, with a long “a” like in “water”\; regarding the last name: “mara” as in actress mara wilson + “so” + “veetch”.
\n< /BODY> X-TAGS;LANGUAGE=en-US:2022\,February\,Marasovic END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT UID:ai1ec-22374@www.clsp.jhu.edu DTSTAMP:20240328T103526Z CATEGORIES;LANGUAGE=en-US:Seminars CONTACT: DESCRIPTION:Abstract\nIn recent years\, the field of Natural Language Proce ssing has seen a profusion of tasks\, datasets\, and systems that facilita te reasoning about real-world situations through language (e.g.\, RTE\, MN LI\, COMET). Such systems might\, for example\, be trained to consider a s ituation where “somebody dropped a glass on the floor\,” and conclude it i s likely that “the glass shattered” as a result. In this talk\, I will dis cuss three pieces of work that revisit assumptions made by or about these systems. In the first work\, I develop a Defeasible Inference task\, which enables a system to recognize when a prior assumption it has made may no longer be true in light of new evidence it receives. The second work I wil l discuss revisits partial-input baselines\, which have highlighted issues of spurious correlations in natural language reasoning datasets and led t o unfavorable assumptions about models’ reasoning abilities. In particular \, I will discuss experiments that show models may still learn to reason i n the presence of spurious dataset artifacts. Finally\, I will touch on wo rk analyzing harmful assumptions made by reasoning models in the form of s ocial stereotypes\, particularly in the case of free-form generative reaso ning models.\nBiography\nRachel Rudinger is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland\, College Par k. She holds joint appointments in the Department of Linguistics and the I nstitute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS). In 2019\, Rachel complete d her Ph.D. in Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University in the Center for Language and Speech Processing. From 2019-2020\, she was a Young Inves tigator at the Allen Institute for AI in Seattle\, and a visiting research er at the University of Washington. Her research interests include computa tional 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-ALT-DESC;FMTTYPE=text/html:\\n\\n\\nAbstr act
\nIn recent years\, the field of Natural Language Proce ssing has seen a profusion of tasks\, datasets\, and systems that facilita te reasoning about real-world situations through language (e.g.\, RTE\, MN LI\, COMET). Such systems might\, for example\, be trained to consider a s ituation where “somebody dropped a glass on the floor\,” and conclude it i s likely that “the glass shattered” as a result. In this talk\, I will dis cuss three pieces of work that revisit assumptions made by or about these systems. In the first work\, I develop a Defeasible Inference task\, which enables a system to recognize when a prior assumption it has made may no longer be true in light of new evidence it receives. The second work I wil l discuss revisits partial-input baselines\, which have highlighted issues of spurious correlations in natural language reasoning datasets and led t o unfavorable assumptions about models’ reasoning abilities. In particular \, I will discuss experiments that show models may still learn to reason i n the presence of spurious dataset artifacts. Finally\, I will touch on wo rk analyzing harmful assumptions made by reasoning models in the form of s ocial stereotypes\, particularly in the case of free-form generative reaso ning models.
\nBiography
\nRachel Rudinger is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the Unive rsity of Maryland\, College Park. She holds joint appointments in the Depa rtment of Linguistics and the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMI ACS). In 2019\, Rachel completed her Ph.D. in Computer Science at Johns Ho pkins University in the Center for Language and Speech Processing. From 20 19-2020\, she was a Young Investigator at the Allen Institute for AI in Se attle\, and a visiting researcher at the University of Washington. Her res earch interests include computational semantics\, common-sense reasoning\, and issues of social bias and fairness in NLP.
\n X-TAGS;LANGUAGE=en-US:2022\,Rudinger\,September END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT UID:ai1ec-22375@www.clsp.jhu.edu DTSTAMP:20240328T103526Z CATEGORIES;LANGUAGE=en-US:Seminars CONTACT: DESCRIPTION:Abstract\nI will present our work on data augmentation using st yle transfer as a way to improve domain adaptation in sequence labeling ta sks. The target domain is social media data\, and the task is named entity recognition (NER). The premise is that we can transform the labelled out of domain data into something that stylistically is more closely related t o the target data. Then we can train a model on a combination of the gener ated data and the smaller amount of in domain data to improve NER predicti on performance. I will show recent empirical results on these efforts.\nIf time allows\, I will also give an overview of other research projects I’m currently leading at RiTUAL (Research in Text Understanding and Analysis of Language) lab. The common thread among all these research problems is t he scarcity of labeled data.\nBiography\nThamar Solorio is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Houston (UH). She holds graduate deg rees in Computer Science from the Instituto Nacional de Astrofísica\, Ópti ca y Electrónica\, in Puebla\, Mexico. Her research interests include info rmation extraction from social media data\, enabling technology for code-s witched data\, stylistic modeling of text\, and more recently multimodal a pproaches for online content understanding. She is the director and founde r of the RiTUAL Lab at UH. She is the recipient of an NSF CAREER award for her work on authorship attribution\, and recipient of the 2014 Emerging L eader ABIE Award in Honor of Denice Denton. She is currently serving a sec ond term as an elected board member of the North American Chapter of the A ssociation of Computational Linguistics and was PC co-chair for NAACL 2019 . She recently joined the team of Editors in Chief for the ACL Rolling Rev iew (ARR) system. Her research is currently funded by the NSF and by ADOBE . DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20220923T120000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20220923T131500 LOCATION:Hackerman Hall B17 @ 3400 N. Charles Street\, Baltimore\, MD 21218 SEQUENCE:0 SUMMARY:Thamar Solorio (University of Houston) “Style Transfer for Data Aug mentation in Sequence Labeling Tasks” URL:https://www.clsp.jhu.edu/events/thamar-solorio-university-of-houston-st yle-transfer-for-data-augmentation-in-sequence-labeling-tasks/ X-COST-TYPE:free X-ALT-DESC;FMTTYPE=text/html:\\n\\n\\nAbstr act
\nI will present our work on data a ugmentation using style transfer as a way to improve domain adaptation in sequence labeling tasks. The target domain is social media data\, and the task is named entity recognition (NER). The premise is that we can transfo rm the labelled out of domain data into something that stylistically is mo re closely related to the target data. Then we can train a model on a comb ination of the generated data and the smaller amount of in domain data to improve NER prediction performance. I will show recent empirical results o n these efforts.
\nIf time allows\, I will also give an overview of other research projects I’m currently leading at RiTUA L (Research in Text Understanding and Analysis of Language) lab. The commo n thread among all these research problems is the scarcity of labeled data .
\nBiography
\nThamar Solorio is a Professor of Computer Science at the Univer sity of Houston (UH). She holds graduate degrees in Computer Science from the Instituto Nacional de Astrofísica\, Óptica y Electrónica\, in Puebla\, Mexico. Her research interests include information extraction from social media data\, enabling technology for code-switched data\, stylistic model ing of text\, and more recently multimodal approaches for online content u nderstanding. She is the director and founder of the RiTUAL Lab at UH. She is the recipient of an NSF CAREER award for her work on authorship attrib ution\, and recipient of the 2014 Emerging Leader ABIE Award in Honor of D enice Denton. She is currently serving a second term as an elected board m ember of the North American Chapter of the Association of Computational Li nguistics and was PC co-chair for NAACL 2019. She recently joined the team of Editors in Chief for the ACL Rolling Review (ARR) system. Her research is currently funded by the NSF and by ADOBE.
\n X-TAGS;LANGUAGE=en-US:2022\,September\,Solorio END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT UID:ai1ec-22380@www.clsp.jhu.edu DTSTAMP:20240328T103526Z CATEGORIES;LANGUAGE=en-US:Seminars CONTACT: DESCRIPTION:Abstract\nThe availability of large multilingual pre-trained la nguage models has opened up exciting pathways for developing NLP technolog ies for languages with scarce resources. In this talk I will advocate for the need to go beyond the most common languages in multilingual evaluation \, and on the challenges of handling new\, unseen-during-training language s and varieties. I will also share some of my experiences with working wit h indigenous and other endangered language communities and activists.\nBio graphy\n\nAntonios Anastasopoulos is an Assistant Professor in Computer Sc ience at George Mason University. In 2019\, Antonis received his PhD in Co mputer Science from the University of Notre Dame and then worked as a post doctoral researcher at the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mel lon University. His research interests revolve around computational lingui stics and natural language processing with a focus on low-resource setting s\, endangered languages\, and cross-lingual learning.\n\n\n DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20220930T120000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20220930T131500 LOCATION:Hackerman Hall B17 @ 3400 N. Charles Street\, Baltimore\, MD 21218 SEQUENCE:0 SUMMARY:Antonios Anastasopoulos (George Mason University) “NLP Beyond the T op-100 Languages” URL:https://www.clsp.jhu.edu/events/antonis-anastasopoulos-george-mason-uni versity/ X-COST-TYPE:free X-ALT-DESC;FMTTYPE=text/html:\\n\\n\\nAbstr act
\nThe availability of large multilingual pre-trained la nguage models has opened up exciting pathways for developing NLP technolog ies for languages with scarce resources. In this talk I will advocate for the need to go beyond the most common languages in multilingual evaluation \, and on the challenges of handling new\, unseen-during-training language s and varieties. I will also share some of my experiences with working wit h indigenous and other endangered language communities and activists.
\nBiography
\nAntonios Anastasopoulos is an Assistant Professor in Compu ter Science at George Mason University. In 2019\, Antonis received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Notre Dame and then worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Language Technologies Institute at Carneg ie Mellon University. His research interests revolve around computational linguistics and natural language processing with a focus on low-resource s ettings\, endangered languages\, and cross-lingual learning.
\n\n X-TAGS;LANGUAGE=en-US:2022\,Anastasopoulos\,September END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT UID:ai1ec-23304@www.clsp.jhu.edu DTSTAMP:20240328T103526Z CATEGORIES;LANGUAGE=en-US:Seminars CONTACT: DESCRIPTION:Abstract\nTransformers are essential to pretraining. As we appr oach 5 years of BERT\, the connection between attention as architecture an d transfer learning remains key to this central thread in NLP. Other archi tectures such as CNNs and RNNs have been used to replicate pretraining res ults\, but these either fail to reach the same accuracy or require supplem ental attention layers. This work revisits the semanal BERT result and con siders pretraining without attention. We consider replacing self-attention layers with recently developed approach for long-range sequence modeling and transformer architecture variants. Specifically\, inspired by recent p apers like the structured space space sequence model (S4)\, we use simple routing layers based on state-space models (SSM) and a bidirectional model architecture based on multiplicative gating. We discuss the results of th e proposed Bidirectional Gated SSM (BiGS) and present a range of analysis into its properties. Results show that architecture does seem to have a no table impact on downstream performance and a different inductive bias that is worth exploring further.\nBiography\nAlexander “Sasha” Rush is an Asso ciate Professor at Cornell Tech. His work is at the intersection of natura l language processing and generative modeling with applications in text ge neration\, efficient inference\, and controllability. He has written sever al popular open-source software projects supporting NLP research and data science\, and works part-time as a researcher at Hugging Face. He is the s ecretary of ICLR and developed software used to run virtual conferences du ring COVID. His work has received paper and demo awards at major NLP\, vis ualization\, and hardware conferences\, an NSF Career Award\, and a Sloan Fellowship. He tweets and blogs\, mostly about coding and ML\, at @srush_n lp. DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20230203T120000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20230203T131500 LOCATION:Hackerman Hall B17 @ 3400 N. Charles Street\, Baltimore\, MD 21218 SEQUENCE:0 SUMMARY:Sasha Rush (Cornell University) “Pretraining Without Attention” URL:https://www.clsp.jhu.edu/events/sasha-rush-cornell-university/ X-COST-TYPE:free X-ALT-DESC;FMTTYPE=text/html:\\n\\n\\n
Abstr act
\nTransformers are essential to pretraining. As we appr oach 5 years of BERT\, the connection between attention as architecture an d transfer learning remains key to this central thread in NLP. Other archi tectures such as CNNs and RNNs have been used to replicate pretraining res ults\, but these either fail to reach the same accuracy or require supplem ental attention layers. This work revisits the semanal BERT result and con siders pretraining without attention. We consider replacing self-attention layers with recently developed approach for long-range sequence modeling and transformer architecture variants. Specifically\, inspired by recent p apers like the structured space space sequence model (S4)\, we use simple routing layers based on state-space models (SSM) and a bidirectional model architecture based on multiplicative gating. We discuss the results of th e proposed Bidirectional Gated SSM (BiGS) and present a range of analysis into its properties. Results show that architecture does seem to have a no table impact on downstream performance and a different inductive bias that is worth exploring further.
\nBiography
\nAbstr act
\nWhile large language models have advanced the state-o f-the-art in natural language processing\, these models are trained on lar ge-scale datasets\, which may include harmful information. Studies have sh own that as a result\, the models exhibit social biases and generate misin formation after training. In this talk\, I will discuss my work on analyzi ng and interpreting the risks of large language models across the areas of fairness\, trustworthiness\, and safety. I will first describe my researc h in the detection of dialect bias between African American English (AAE) vs. Standard American English (SAE). The second part investigates the trus tworthiness of models through the memorization and subsequent generation o f conspiracy theories. I will end my talk with recent work in AI safety re garding text that may lead to physical harm.
\nBiography
\nSharon is a 5th-year Ph.D. candidate at the University of Ca lifornia\, Santa Barbara\, where she is advised by Professor William Wang. Her research interests lie in natural language processing\, with a focus on Responsible AI. Sharon’s research spans the subareas of fairness\, trus tworthiness\, and safety\, with publications in ACL\, EMNLP\, WWW\, and LR EC. She has spent summers interning at AWS\, Meta\, and Pinterest. Sharon is a 2022 EECS Rising Star and a current recipient of the Amazon Alexa AI Fellowship for Responsible AI.
\n X-TAGS;LANGUAGE=en-US:2023\,February\,Levy END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT UID:ai1ec-23308@www.clsp.jhu.edu DTSTAMP:20240328T103526Z CATEGORIES;LANGUAGE=en-US:Seminars CONTACT: DESCRIPTION:Abstract\nBiases in datasets\, or unintentionally introduced sp urious cues\, are a common source of misspecification in machine learning. Performant models trained on such data can gender stereotype or be brittl e under distribution shift. In this talk\, we present several results in multimodal and question answering applications studying sources of dataset bias\, and several mitigation methods. We propose approaches where known dimensions of dataset bias are explicitly factored out of a model during learning\, without needing to modify data. Finally\, we ask whether datase t biases can be attributable to annotator behavior during annotation. Draw ing inspiration from work in psychology on cognitive biases\, we show cert ain behavioral patterns are highly indicative of the creation of problemat ic (but valid) data instances in question answering. We give evidence that many existing observations around how dataset bias propagates to models c an be attributed to data samples created by annotators we identify.\nBiogr aphy\nMark Yatskar is an Assistant Professor at University of Pennsylvania in the department of Computer and Information Science. He did his PhD at University of Washington co-advised by Luke Zettlemoyer and Ali Farhadi. H e was a Young Investigator at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intellige nce for several years working with their computer vision team\, Prior. His work spans Natural Language Processing\, Computer Vision\, and Fairness i n Machine Learning. He received a Best Paper Award at EMNLP for work on ge nder bias amplification\, and his work has been featured in Wired and the New York Times. DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20230210T120000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20230210T131500 LOCATION:Hackerman Hall B17 @ 3400 N. Charles Street\, Baltimore\, MD 21218 SEQUENCE:0 SUMMARY:Mark Yatskar (University of Pennsylvania) “Understanding Dataset Bi ases: Behavioral Indicators During Annotation and Contrastive Mitigations” URL:https://www.clsp.jhu.edu/events/mark-yatskar-university-of-pennsylvania / X-COST-TYPE:free X-ALT-DESC;FMTTYPE=text/html:\\n\\n\\nAbstr act
\nBiases in datasets\, or unintentionally introduced sp urious cues\, are a common source of misspecification in machine learning. Performant models trained on such data can gender stereotype or be brittl e under distribution shift. In this talk\, we present several results in multimodal and question answering applications studying sources of dataset bias\, and several mitigation methods. We propose approaches where known dimensions of dataset bias are explicitly factored out of a model during learning\, without needing to modify data. Finally\, we ask whether datase t biases can be attributable to annotator behavior during annotation. Draw ing inspiration from work in psychology on cognitive biases\, we show cert ain behavioral patterns are highly indicative of the creation of problemat ic (but valid) data instances in question answering. We give evidence that many existing observations around how dataset bias propagates to models c an be attributed to data samples created by annotators we identify.
\n< p>Biography\nMark Yatskar is an Assistan t Professor at University of Pennsylvania in the department of Computer an d Information Science. He did his PhD at University of Washington co-advis ed by Luke Zettlemoyer and Ali Farhadi. He was a Young Investigator at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence for several years working wit h their computer vision team\, Prior. His work spans Natural Language Proc essing\, Computer Vision\, and Fairness in Machine Learning. He received a Best Paper Award at EMNLP for work on gender bias amplification\, and his work has been featured in Wired and the New York Times.
\n\n X-TAGS;LANGUAGE=en-US:2023\,February\,Yatskar END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT UID:ai1ec-23314@www.clsp.jhu.edu DTSTAMP:20240328T103526Z CATEGORIES;LANGUAGE=en-US:Seminars CONTACT: DESCRIPTION:Abstract\nWhile GPT models have shown impressive performance on summarization and open-ended text generation\, it’s important to assess t heir abilities on more constrained text generation tasks that require sign ificant and diverse rewritings. In this talk\, I will discuss the challeng es of evaluating systems that are highly competitive and perform close to humans on two such tasks: (i) paraphrase generation and (ii) text simplifi cation. To address these challenges\, we introduce an interactive Rank-and -Rate evaluation framework. Our results show that GPT-3.5 has made a major step up from fine-tuned T5 in paraphrase generation\, but still lacks the diversity and creativity of humans who spontaneously produce large quanti ties of paraphrases.\nAdditionally\, we demonstrate that GPT-3.5 performs similarly to a single human in text simplification\, which makes it diffic ult for existing automatic evaluation metrics to distinguish between the t wo. To overcome this shortcoming\, we propose LENS\, a learnable evaluatio n metric that outperforms SARI\, BERTScore\, and other existing methods in both automatic evaluation and minimal risk decoding for text generation. \nBiography\nWei Xu is an assistant professor in the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology\, where she is also affi liated with the new NSF AI CARING Institute and Machine Learning Center. S he received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from New York University and her B.S. and M.S. from Tsinghua University. Xu’s research interests are in na tural language processing\, machine learning\, and social media\, with a f ocus on text generation\, stylistics\, robustness and controllability of m achine learning models\, and reading and writing assistive technology. She is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award\, CrowdFlower AI for Everyone Awar d\, Criteo Faculty Research Award\, and Best Paper Award at COLING’18. She has also received funds from DARPA and IARPA. She is an elected member of the NAACL executive board and regularly serves as a senior area chair for AI/NLP conferences. DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20230224T120000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20230224T131500 LOCATION:Hackerman Hall B17 @ 3400 N. Charles Street\, Baltimore\, MD 21218 SEQUENCE:0 SUMMARY:Wei Xu (Georgia Tech) “GPT-3 vs Humans: Rethinking Evaluation of Na tural Language Generation” URL:https://www.clsp.jhu.edu/events/wei-xu-georgia-tech/ X-COST-TYPE:free X-ALT-DESC;FMTTYPE=text/html:\\n\\n
\\nAbstr act
\nWhile GPT mo dels have shown impressive performance on summarization and open-ended tex t generation\, it’s important to assess their abilities on more constraine d text generation tasks that require significant and diverse rewritings. I n this talk\, I will discuss the challenges of evaluating systems that are highly competitive and perform close to humans on two such tasks: (i) par aphrase generation and (ii) text simplification. To address these challeng es\, we introduce an interactive Rank-and-Rate evaluation framework. Our r esults show that GPT-3.5 has made a major step up from fine-tuned T5 in pa raphrase generation\, but still lacks the diversity and creativity of huma ns who spontaneously produce large quantities of paraphrases.
\nAdditionally\, we demon strate that GPT-3.5 performs similarly to a single human in text simplific ation\, which makes it difficult for existing automatic evaluation metrics to distinguish between the two. To overcome this shortcoming\, we propose LENS\, a learnable evaluation metric that outperforms SARI\, BERTScore\, and other existing methods in both automatic evaluation and minimal risk d ecoding for text generation.
\nBiography
\nWei Xu is an assis tant professor in the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Insti tute of Technology\, where she is also affiliated with the new NSF AI CARI NG Institute and Machine Learning Center. She received her Ph.D. in Comput er Science from New York University and her B.S. and M.S. from Tsinghua Un iversity. Xu’s research interests are in natural language processing\, mac hine learning\, and social media\, with a focus on text generation\, styli stics\, robustness and controllability of machine learning models\, and re ading and writing assistive technology. She is a recipient of the NSF CARE ER Award\, CrowdFlower AI for Everyone Award\, Criteo Faculty Research Awa rd\, and Best Paper Award at COLING’18. She has also received funds from D ARPA and IARPA. She is an elected member of the NAACL executive board and regularly serves as a senior area chair for AI/NLP conferences.
\n X-TAGS;LANGUAGE=en-US:2023\,February\,Xu END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT UID:ai1ec-23316@www.clsp.jhu.edu DTSTAMP:20240328T103526Z CATEGORIES;LANGUAGE=en-US:Seminars CONTACT: DESCRIPTION:Abstract\nUnderstanding the implications underlying a text is c ritical to assessing its impact\, in particular the social dynamics that m ay result from a reading of the text. This requires endowing artificial in telligence (AI) systems with pragmatic reasoning\, for example to correctl y conclude that the statement “Epidemics and cases of disease in the 21st century are “staged”” relates to unfounded conspiracy theories. In this ta lk\, I discuss how shortcomings in the ability of current AI systems to re ason about pragmatics present challenges to equitable detection of false o r harmful language. I demonstrate how these shortcomings can be addressed by imposing human-interpretable structure on deep learning architectures u sing insights from linguistics.In the first part of the talk\, I describe how adversarial text generation algorithms can be used to improve robustne ss of content moderation systems. I then introduce a pragmatic formalism f or reasoning about harmful implications conveyed by social media text. I s how how this pragmatic approach can be combined with generative neural lan guage models to uncover implications of news headlines. I also address the bottleneck to progress in text generation posed by gaps in evaluation of factuality. I conclude by showing how context-aware content moderation can be used to ensure safe interactions with conversational agents.\n \nBiogr aphy\nSaadia Gabriel is a PhD candidate in the Paul G. Allen School of Com puter Science & Engineering at the University of Washington\, advised by P rof. Yejin Choi and Prof. Franziska Roesner. Her researchrevolves around n atural language processing and machine learning\, with a particular focus on building systems for understanding how social commonsense manifests in text (i.e. how do people typically behave in social scenarios)\, as well a s mitigating spread of false or harmful text (e.g. Covid-19 misinformation ). Her work has been covered by a wide range of media outlets like Forbes and TechCrunch. It has also received a 2019 ACL best short paper nominatio n\, a 2019 IROS RoboCup best paper nomination and won a best paper award a t the 2020 WeCNLP summit. Prior to her PhD\, Saadia received a BA summa cu m laude from Mount Holyoke College in Computer Science and Mathematics.\n DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20230227T120000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20230227T131500 LOCATION:Hackerman Hall B17 @ 3400 N. Charles Street\, Baltimore\, MD 21218 SEQUENCE:0 SUMMARY:Saadia Gabriel (University of Washington) “Socially Responsible and Factual Reasoning for Equitable AI Systems” URL:https://www.clsp.jhu.edu/events/saadia-gabriel-university-of-washington -socially-responsible-and-factual-reasoning-for-equitable-ai-systems/ X-COST-TYPE:free X-ALT-DESC;FMTTYPE=text/html:\\n\\n\\nAbstr act
\nUnderstanding the implications underlying a text is c
ritical to assessing its impact\, in particular the social dynamics that m
ay result from a reading of the text. This requires endowing artificial in
telligence (AI) systems with pragmatic reasoning\, for example to correctl
y conclude that the statement “Epidemics and cases of disease in the 21st
century are “staged”” relates to unfounded conspiracy theories. In this ta
lk\, I discuss how shortcomings in the ability of current AI systems to re
ason about pragmatics present challenges to equitable detection of false o
r harmful language. I demonstrate how these shortcomings can be addressed
by imposing human-interpretable structure on deep learning architectures u
sing insights from linguistics.
In the first part of the talk\, I describe how adversarial text gen
eration algorithms can be used to improve robustness of content moderation
systems. I then introduce a pragmatic formalism for reasoning about harmf
ul implications conveyed by social media text. I show how this pragmatic a
pproach can be combined with generative neural language models to uncover
implications of news headlines. I also address the bottleneck to progress
in text generation posed by gaps in evaluation of factuality. I conclude b
y showing how context-aware content moderation can be used to ensure safe
interactions with conversational agents.
\n
Biography
\nSaadia Gabr iel is a PhD candidate in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Scie nce & Engineering at the University of Washington\, advised by Prof. Yejin Choi and Prof. Franziska Roesner. Her research re volves around natural language processing and machine learning\, with a pa rticular focus on building systems for understanding how social commonsens e manifests in text (i.e. how do people typically behave in social scenari os)\, as well as mitigating spread of false or harmful text (e.g. Covid-19 misinformation). Her work has been covered by a wide range of media outle ts like Forbes and TechCrunch. It has also received a 2019 ACL best short paper nomination\, a 2019 IROS RoboCup best paper nomination and won a bes t paper award at the 2020 WeCNLP summit. Prior to her PhD\, Saadia received a BA summa cum laude from Mount Holyoke College in Computer Sc ience and Mathematics.
\n\n X-TAGS;LANGUAGE=en-US:2023\,February\,Gabriel END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT UID:ai1ec-23312@www.clsp.jhu.edu DTSTAMP:20240328T103526Z CATEGORIES;LANGUAGE=en-US:Seminars CONTACT: DESCRIPTION:Abstract\nAdvanced neural language models have grown ever large r and more complex\, pushing forward the limits of language understanding and generation\, while diminishing interpretability. The black-box nature of deep neural networks blocks humans from understanding them\, as well as trusting and using them in real-world applications. This talk will introd uce interpretation techniques that bridge the gap between humans and model s for developing trustworthy natural language processing(NLP). I will firs t show how to explain black-box models and evaluate their explanations for understanding their prediction behavior. Then I will introduce how to imp rove the interpretability of neural language models by making their decisi on-making transparent and rationalized. Finally\, I will discuss how to di agnose and improve models (e.g.\, robustness) through the lens of explanat ions. I will conclude with future research directions that are centered ar ound model interpretability and committed to facilitating communications a nd interactions between intelligent machines\, system developers\, and end users for long-term trustworthy AI.\nBiography\nHanjie Chen is a Ph.D. ca ndidate in Computer Science at the University of Virginia\, advised by Pro f. Yangfeng Ji. Her research interests lie in Trustworthy AI\, Natural Lan guage Processing (NLP)\, andInterpretable Machine Learning. She develops i nterpretation techniques to explain neural language models and make their prediction behavior transparent and reliable. She is a recipient of the Ca rlos and Esther Farrar Fellowship and the Best Poster Award at the ACM CAP WIC 2021. Her work has been published at top-tier NLP/AI conferences (e.g. \, ACL\, AAAI\, EMNLP\, NAACL) and selected by the National Center for Wom en & Information Technology (NCWIT) Collegiate Award Finalist 2021. She (a s the primary instructor) co-designed and taught the course\, Interpretabl e Machine Learning\, and was awarded the UVA CS Outstanding Graduate Teach ing Award and University-wide Graduate Teaching Awards Nominee (top 5% of graduate instructors). More details can be found athttps://www.cs.virginia .edu/~hc9mx DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20230313T120000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20230313T131500 LOCATION:Hackerman Hall B17 @ 3400 N. Charles Street\, Baltimore\, MD 21218 SEQUENCE:0 SUMMARY:Hanjie Chen (University of Virginia) “Bridging Humans and Machines: Techniques for Trustworthy NLP” URL:https://www.clsp.jhu.edu/events/hanjie-chen-university-of-virginia/ X-COST-TYPE:free X-ALT-DESC;FMTTYPE=text/html:\\n\\n\\n
Abstr act
\nAdvanced neural language models have grown ever large
r and more complex\, pushing forward the limits of language understanding
and generation\, while diminishing interpretability. The black-box nature
of deep neural networks blocks humans from understanding them\, as well as
trusting and using them in real-world applications. This talk will introd
uce interpretation techniques that bridge the gap between humans and model
s for developing trustworthy natural language processing
(NLP). I will first show how to explain black-box models and evalua
te their explanations for understanding their prediction behavior. Then I
will introduce how to improve the interpretability of neural language mode
ls by making their decision-making transparent and rationalized. Finally\,
I will discuss how to diagnose and improve models (e.g.\, robustness) thr
ough the lens of explanations. I will conclude with future research direct
ions that are centered around model interpretability and committed to faci
litating communications and interactions between intelligent machines\, sy
stem developers\, and end users for long-term trustworthy AI.
Hanjie Chen is a Ph.D. candidate in Compute r Science at the University of Virginia\, advised by Prof. Yangfeng Ji. He r research interests lie in Trustworthy AI\, Natural Language Processing ( NLP)\, and
\n X-TAGS;LANGUAGE=en-US:2023\,Chen\,February END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT UID:ai1ec-23882@www.clsp.jhu.edu DTSTAMP:20240328T103526Z CATEGORIES;LANGUAGE=en-US:Seminars CONTACT: DESCRIPTION:Abstract\nLarge language models (LLMs) have demonstrated incred ible power\, but they also possess vulnerabilities that can lead to misuse and potential attacks. In this presentation\, we will address two fundame ntal questions regarding the responsible utilization of LLMs: (1) How can we accurately identify AI-generated text? (2) What measures can safeguard the intellectual property of LLMs? We will introduce two recent watermarki ng techniques designed for text and models\, respectively. Our discussion will encompass the theoretical underpinnings that ensure the correctness o f watermark detection\, along with robustness against evasion attacks. Fur thermore\, we will showcase empirical evidence validating their effectiven ess. These findings establish a solid technical groundwork for policymaker s\, legal professionals\, and generative AI practitioners alike.\nBiograph y\nLei Li is an Assistant Professor in Language Technology Institute at Ca rnegie Mellon University. He received Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon Universit y School of Computer Science. He is a recipient of ACL 2021 Best Paper Awa rd\, CCF Young Elite Award in 2019\, CCF distinguished speaker in 2017\, W u Wen-tsün AI prize in 2017\, and 2012 ACM SIGKDD dissertation award (runn er-up)\, and is recognized as Notable Area Chair of ICLR 2023. Previously\ , he was a faculty member at UC Santa Barbara. Prior to that\, he founded ByteDance AI Lab in 2016 and led its research in NLP\, ML\, Robotics\, an d Drug Discovery. He launched ByteDance’s machine translation system VolcT rans and AI writing system Xiaomingbot\, serving one billion users. DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20230901T120000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20230901T131500 LOCATION:Hackerman Hall B17 @ 3400 N. Charles Street\, Baltimore\, MD 21218 SEQUENCE:0 SUMMARY:Lei Li (Carnegie Mellon University) “Empowering Responsible Use of Large Language Models” URL:https://www.clsp.jhu.edu/events/lei-li-carnegie-mellon-university-empow ering-responsible-use-of-large-language-models/ X-COST-TYPE:free X-ALT-DESC;FMTTYPE=text/html:\\n\\n\\n Interpretable Machine Learning. She dev elops interpretation techniques to explain neural language models and make their prediction behavior transparent and reliable. She is a recipient of the Carlos and Esther Farrar Fellowship and the Best Poster Award at the ACM CAPWIC 2021. Her work has been published at top-tier NLP/AI conference s (e.g.\, ACL\, AAAI\, EMNLP\, NAACL) and selected by the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) Collegiate Award Finalist 2021. She (as the primary instructor) co-designed and taught the course\, Inter pretable Machine Learning\, and was awarded the UVA CS Outstanding Graduat e Teaching Award and University-wide Graduate Teaching Awards Nominee (top 5% of graduate instructors). More details can be found at https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~hc9mxAbstr act
\nLarge language models (LLMs) have demonstrated incred ible power\, but they also possess vulnerabilities that can lead to misuse and potential attacks. In this presentation\, we will address two fundame ntal questions regarding the responsible utilization of LLMs: (1) How can we accurately identify AI-generated text? (2) What measures can safeguard the intellectual property of LLMs? We will introduce two recent watermarki ng techniques designed for text and models\, respectively. Our discussion will encompass the theoretical underpinnings that ensure the correctness o f watermark detection\, along with robustness against evasion attacks. Fur thermore\, we will showcase empirical evidence validating their effectiven ess. These findings establish a solid technical groundwork for policymaker s\, legal professionals\, and generative AI practitioners alike.
\n< strong>Biography
\nLei Li is an Assistant Professor in Lang uage Technology Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He received Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science. He is a recip ient of ACL 2021 Best Paper Award\, CCF Young Elite Award in 2019\, CCF di stinguished speaker in 2017\, Wu Wen-tsün AI prize in 2017\, and 2012 ACM SIGKDD dissertation award (runner-up)\, and is recognized as Notable Area Chair of ICLR 2023. Previously\, he was a faculty member at UC Santa Barba ra. Prior to that\, he founded ByteDance AI Lab in 2016 and led its resea rch in NLP\, ML\, Robotics\, and Drug Discovery. He launched ByteDance’s m achine translation system VolcTrans and AI writing system Xiaomingbot\, se rving one billion users.
\n X-TAGS;LANGUAGE=en-US:2023\,Li\,September END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT UID:ai1ec-23886@www.clsp.jhu.edu DTSTAMP:20240328T103526Z CATEGORIES;LANGUAGE=en-US:Seminars CONTACT: DESCRIPTION:Abstract\nThe arms race to build increasingly larger\, powerful language models (LMs) in the past year has been remarkable. Yet incorpora ting LMs effectively into practical applications that facilitate manual wo rkflows remains challenging. I will discuss LMs’ limiting factors and our efforts to overcome them. I will start with challenges surrounding efficie nt and robust LM alignment. I will share insights from our recent paper “S elf-Instruct” (ACL 2023)\, where we used vanilla (unaligned) LMs for align ing itself\, an approach that has yielded some success. Then\, I will move on to the challenge of tracing the output of LMs to reliable sources\, a weakness that makes them prone to hallucinations. I will discuss our recen t approach of ‘according-to’ prompting\, which steers LMs to quote directl y from sources observed in its pre-training. If time permits\, I will disc uss our ongoing project to adapt LMs to interact with web pages. Throughou t the presentation\, I will highlight our progress\, and end with question s about our future progress.\nBiography\nDaniel Khashabi is an assistant p rofessor in computer science at Johns Hopkins University and the Center fo r Language and Speech Processing (CLSP) member. He is interested in buildi ng reasoning-driven modular NLP systems that are robust\, transparent\, an d communicative\, particularly those that use natural language as the comm unication medium. Khashabi has published over 40 papers on natural languag e processing and AI in top-tier venues. His work touches upon developing. His research has won the ACL 2023 Outstanding Paper Award\, NAACL 2022 Bes t Paper Award\, research gifts from the Allen Institute for AI\, and an Am azon Research Award 2023. Before joining Hopkins\, he was a postdoctoral f ellow at the Allen Institute for AI (2019-2022) and obtained a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 2019. DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20230908T120000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20230908T131500 LOCATION:Hackerman Hall B17 @ 3400 N. Charles Street\, Baltimore\, MD 21218 SEQUENCE:0 SUMMARY:Daniel Khashabi (Johns Hopkins University) “Building More Helpful L anguage Models” URL:https://www.clsp.jhu.edu/events/daniel-khashabi-johns-hopkins-universit y/ X-COST-TYPE:free X-ALT-DESC;FMTTYPE=text/html:\\n\\n\\nAbstr act
\nThe arms race to build increasingly larger\, powerful language models (LMs) in the past year has been remarkable. Yet incorpora ting LMs effectively into practical applications that facilitate manual wo rkflows remains challenging. I will discuss LMs’ limiting factors and our efforts to overcome them. I will start with challenges surrounding efficie nt and robust LM alignment. I will share insights from our recent paper “Self-Instruct” (ACL 2023)\, where we used vanilla (unaligned) LMs for aligning itself\, an approach that has yielded some success. Then\, I will move on to the challenge of t racing the output of LMs to reliable sources\, a weakness that makes them prone to hallucinations. I will discuss our recent approach of ‘according-to’ prompting\, which steers LM s to quote directly from sources observed in its pre-training. If time per mits\, I will discuss our ongoing project to adapt LMs to interact with we b pages. Throughout the presentation\, I will highlight our progress\, and end with questions about our future progress.
\nBiography strong>
\nDaniel Khashabi is an assistant professor in computer science at Johns Hopkins University and the Center for Language and Speech Pr ocessing (CLSP) member. He is interested in building reasoning-driven modu lar NLP systems that are robust\, transparent\, and communicative\, partic ularly those that use natural language as the communication medium. Khasha bi has published over 40 papers on natural language processing and AI in t op-tier venues. His work touches upon developing. His research has won the ACL 2023 Outstanding Paper Award\, NAACL 2022 Best Paper Award\, research gifts from the Allen Institute for AI\, and an Amazon Research Award 2023 . Before joining Hopkins\, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Allen Insti tute for AI (2019-2022) and obtained a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsy lvania in 2019.
\n X-TAGS;LANGUAGE=en-US:2023\,Khashabi\,September END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT UID:ai1ec-23888@www.clsp.jhu.edu DTSTAMP:20240328T103526Z CATEGORIES;LANGUAGE=en-US:Student Seminars CONTACT: DESCRIPTION:Abstract\nEmbedding text sequences is a widespread requirement in modern language understanding. Existing approaches focus largely on con stant-size representations. This is problematic\, as the amount of informa tion contained in text often varies with the length of the input. We propo se a solution called Nugget\, which encodes language into a representation based on a dynamically selected subset of input tokens. These nuggets are learned through tasks like autoencoding and machine translation\, and int uitively segment language into meaningful units. We demonstrate Nugget out performs related approaches in tasks involving semantic comparison. Finall y\, we illustrate these compact units allow for expanding the contextual w indow of a language model (LM)\, suggesting new future LMs that can condit ion on significantly larger amounts of content. DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20230911T120000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20230911T131500 LOCATION:Hackerman Hall B17 @ 3400 N. Charles Street\, Baltimore\, MD 21218 SEQUENCE:0 SUMMARY:Student Seminar – Guanghui Qin “Nugget: Neural Agglomerative Embedd ings of Text (ICML 2023)” URL:https://www.clsp.jhu.edu/events/student-seminar-guanghui-qin/ X-COST-TYPE:free X-ALT-DESC;FMTTYPE=text/html:\\n\\n\\nAbstr act
\nEmbedding text sequ ences is a widespread requirement in modern language understanding. Existi ng approaches focus largely on constant-size representations. This is prob lematic\, as the amount of information contained in text often varies with the length of the input. We propose a solution called Nugget\, which enco des language into a representation based on a dynamically selected subset of input tokens. These nuggets are learned through tasks like autoencoding and machine translation\, and intuitively segment language into meaningfu l units. We demonstrate Nugget outperforms related approaches in tasks inv olving semantic comparison. Finally\, we illustrate these compact units al low for expanding the contextual window of a language model (LM)\, suggest ing new future LMs that can condition on significantly larger amounts of c ontent.
\n X-TAGS;LANGUAGE=en-US:2023\,Qin\,September END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT UID:ai1ec-23892@www.clsp.jhu.edu DTSTAMP:20240328T103526Z CATEGORIES;LANGUAGE=en-US:Seminars CONTACT: DESCRIPTION:Abstract\nThe growing power in computing and AI promises a near -term future of human-machine teamwork. In this talk\, I will present my r esearch group’s efforts in understanding the complex dynamics of human-mac hine interaction and designing intelligent machines aimed to assist and co llaborate with people. I will focus on 1) tools for onboarding machine tea mmates and authoring machine assistance\, 2) methods for detecting\, and b roadly managing\, errors in collaboration\, and 3) building blocks of know ledge needed to enable ad hoc human-machine teamwork. I will also highligh t our recent work on designing assistive\, collaborative machines to suppo rt older adults aging in place.\nBiography\nChien-Ming Huang is the John C . Malone Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the Johns Hopkins University. His research focuses on designing interactive AI aimed to assist and collaborate with people. He publishes in top-tier ven ues in HRI\, HCI\, and robotics including Science Robotics\, HRI\, CHI\, a nd CSCW. His research has received media coverage from MIT Technology Revi ew\, Tech Insider\, and Science Nation. Huang completed his postdoctoral t raining at Yale University and received his Ph.D. in Computer Science at t he University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER aw ard. https://www.cs.jhu.edu/~cmhuang/ DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20230915T120000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20230915T131500 LOCATION:Hackerman Hall B17 @ 3400 N. Charles Street\, Baltimore\, MD 21218 SEQUENCE:0 SUMMARY:Chien-Ming Huang (Johns Hopkins University) “Becoming Teammates: De signing Assistive\, Collaborative Machines” URL:https://www.clsp.jhu.edu/events/chien-ming-huang-johns-hopkins-universi ty/ X-COST-TYPE:free X-ALT-DESC;FMTTYPE=text/html:\\n\\n\\nAbstr act
\nThe growing power in computing and AI promises a near -term future of human-machine teamwork. In this talk\, I will present my r esearch group’s efforts in understanding the complex dynamics of human-mac hine interaction and designing intelligent machines aimed to assist and co llaborate with people. I will focus on 1) tools for onboarding machine tea mmates and authoring machine assistance\, 2) methods for detecting\, and b roadly managing\, errors in collaboration\, and 3) building blocks of know ledge needed to enable ad hoc human-machine teamwork. I will also highligh t our recent work on designing assistive\, collaborative machines to suppo rt older adults aging in place.
\nBiography
\nChien-Ming Huang is the John C. Malone Assistant Professor in the Departm ent of Computer Science at the Johns Hopkins University. His research focu ses on designing interactive AI aimed to assist and collaborate with peopl e. He publishes in top-tier venues in HRI\, HCI\, and robotics including S cience Robotics\, HRI\, CHI\, and CSCW. His research has received media co verage from MIT Technology Review\, Tech Insider\, and Science Nation. Hua ng completed his postdoctoral training at Yale University and received his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER award. https://www .cs.jhu.edu/~cmhuang/
\n X-TAGS;LANGUAGE=en-US:2023\,Huang\,September END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT UID:ai1ec-23894@www.clsp.jhu.edu DTSTAMP:20240328T103526Z CATEGORIES;LANGUAGE=en-US:Seminars CONTACT: DESCRIPTION:Abstract\nThe use of NLP in the realm of financial technology i s broad and complex\, with applications ranging from sentiment analysis an d named entity recognition to question answering. Large Language Models (L LMs) have been shown to be effective on a variety of tasks\; however\, no LLM specialized for the financial domain has been reported in the literatu re. In this work\, we present BloombergGPT\, a 50 billion parameter langua ge model that is trained on a wide range of financial data. We construct a 363 billion token dataset based on Bloomberg’s extensive data sources\, p erhaps the largest domain-specific dataset yet\, augmented with 345 billio n tokens from general-purpose datasets. We validate BloombergGPT on stand ard LLM benchmarks\, open financial benchmarks\, and a suite of internal b enchmarks that most accurately reflect our intended usage. Our mixed datas et training leads to a model that outperforms existing models on financial tasks by significant margins without sacrificing performance on general L LM benchmarks. Additionally\, we explain our modeling choices\, training p rocess\, and evaluation methodology.\nBiography\nMark Dredze is the John C Malone Professor of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University and the Director of Research (Foundations of AI) for the JHU AI-X Foundry. He deve lops Artificial Intelligence Systems based on natural language processing and explores applications to public health and medicine.\nProf. Dredze is affiliated with the Malone Center for Engineering in Healthcare\, the Cent er for Language and Speech Processing\, among others. He holds a joint app ointment in the Biomedical Informatics & Data Science Section (BIDS)\, und er the Department of Medicine (DOM)\, Division of General Internal Medicin e (GIM) in the School of Medicine. He obtained his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 2009. DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20230918T120000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20230918T131500 LOCATION:Hackerman Hall B17 @ 3400 N. Charles Street\, Baltimore\, MD 21218 SEQUENCE:0 SUMMARY:Mark Dredze (Johns Hopkins University) “BloombergGPT: A Large Langu age Model for Finance” URL:https://www.clsp.jhu.edu/events/mark-dredze-johns-hopkins-university/ X-COST-TYPE:free X-ALT-DESC;FMTTYPE=text/html:\\n\\n\\nAbstr act
\nThe use of NLP in the realm of financial technology i s broad and complex\, with applications ranging from sentiment analysis an d named entity recognition to question answering. Large Language Models (L LMs) have been shown to be effective on a variety of tasks\; however\, no LLM specialized for the financial domain has been reported in the literatu re. In this work\, we present BloombergGPT\, a 50 billion parameter langua ge model that is trained on a wide range of financial data. We construct a 363 billion token dataset based on Bloomberg’s extensive data sources\, p erhaps the largest domain-specific dataset yet\, augmented with 345 billio n tokens from general-purpose datasets. We validate BloombergGPT on stand ard LLM benchmarks\, open financial benchmarks\, and a suite of internal b enchmarks that most accurately reflect our intended usage. Our mixed datas et training leads to a model that outperforms existing models on financial tasks by significant margins without sacrificing performance on general L LM benchmarks. Additionally\, we explain our modeling choices\, training p rocess\, and evaluation methodology.
\nBiography
\nMark Dredze is the John C Malone Professor of Computer Science at Jo hns Hopkins University and the Director of Research (Foundations of AI) fo r the JHU AI-X Foundry. He develops Artificial Intelligence Systems based on natural language processing and explores applications to public health and medicine.
\nProf. Dredze is affiliated with the Malone Center fo r Engineering in Healthcare\, the Center for Language and Speech Processin g\, among others. He holds a joint appointment in the Bio medical Informatics & Data Science Section (< span class='il'>BIDS)\, under the Department of Medicine (DOM)\, Di vision of General Internal Medicine (GIM) in the School of Medicine. He ob tained his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 2009.
\n HTML> X-TAGS;LANGUAGE=en-US:2023\,Dredze\,September END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT UID:ai1ec-23983@www.clsp.jhu.edu DTSTAMP:20240328T103526Z CATEGORIES;LANGUAGE=en-US:Seminars CONTACT: DESCRIPTION:Abstract\nVisually rich documents (scanned or digital) remain i mportant for many consumer and business use cases. During this talk we wil l share recent work from our team in the Document Intelligence Lab of Adob e Research to understand\, create\, and interact with these documents. Fi rst\, we’ll share a series of work on building models to decompose and und erstand the structure of documents to support use cases around document an alysis and accessibility. Next\, we’ll explore document semantic understan ding for a project where we convert natural language contract clauses to c ode to support business automation. Finally\, we’ll discuss DocEdit\, a mo del and dataset that enables editing structured documents from natural lan guage. \nBIOS:\nRajiv Jain is a Senior Research Scientist in the Document Intelligence Lab in Adobe Research\, where his research focuses on underst anding the layout\, content\, and interaction with documents. Prior to joi ning Adobe\, Rajiv was a consultant at DARPA\, where he worked on the Medi a Forensics Program to secure digital imagery. He previously served for 10 years as a researcher for the Department of Defense where he worked on pr ojects around large scale systems\, computer vision\, and network security . He received his PhD in computer science from the University of Maryland\ , College Park working in the field of document image analysis and retriev al.\nChris Tensmeyer primarily focuses on multi-modal document layout and content understanding as a Research Scientist in the Document Intelligence Lab of Adobe Research. Since joining Adobe 5 years ago\, his work has di rectly impacted popular Adobe features such as mobile Acrobat Liquid Mode\ , PDF table extraction\, handwriting recognition\, and scanned document de tection. Other research interests include general Computer Vision and Dee p Learning. He received his PhD in Computer Science from Brigham Young Un iversity on the topic of Deep Learning for Document Image Analysis. DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20230922T120000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20230922T131500 LOCATION:Hackerman Hall B17 @ 3400 N. Charles Street\, Baltimore\, MD 21218 SEQUENCE:0 SUMMARY:Rajiv Jain and Chris Tensmeyer (Adobe) “Document Intelligence at Ad obe Research” URL:https://www.clsp.jhu.edu/events/rajiv-jain-and-chris-tensmeyer-adobe-do cument-intelligence-at-adobe-research/ X-COST-TYPE:free X-ALT-DESC;FMTTYPE=text/html:\\n\\n\\nAbstr act
\nVisually rich document s (scanned or digital) remain important for many consumer and business use cases. During this talk we will sha re recent work from our team in the Document Intelligence Lab of Adobe Res earch to understand\, create\, and interact with these documents. First\, we’ll share a series of work on building models to decompose and understa nd the structure of documents to support use cases around document analysi s and accessibility. Next\, we’ll explore document semantic understanding for a project where we convert natural language contract clauses to code t o support business automation. Finally\, we’ll discuss DocEdit\, a model a nd dataset that enables editing structured documents from natural language .
\nBIOS:
\nRajiv Jain is a Senior Research Scientist in the Do cument Intelligence Lab in Adobe Research\, where his research focuses on understanding the layout\, content\, and interaction with documents. Prior to joining Adobe\, Rajiv was a consultant at DARPA\, where he worked on t he Media Forensics Program to secure digital imagery. He previously served for 10 years as a researcher for the Department of Defense where he worke d on projects around large scale systems\, computer vision\, and network s ecurity. He received his PhD in computer science from the University of Ma ryland\, College Park working in the field of document image analysis and retrieval.
\nChris Ten smeyer primarily focuses on multi-modal document layout and conte nt understanding as a Research Scientist in the Document Intelligence Lab of Adobe Research. Since joining Adobe 5 years ago\, his work has directl y impacted popular Adobe features such as mobile Acrobat Liquid Mode\, PDF table extraction\, handwriting recognition\, and scanned document detecti on. Other research interests include general Computer Vision and Deep Lea rning. He received his PhD in Computer Science from Brigham Young Univers ity on the topic of Deep Learning for Document Image Analysis.
\n X-TAGS;LANGUAGE=en-US:2023\,Jain and Tensmeyer\,September END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT UID:ai1ec-23896@www.clsp.jhu.edu DTSTAMP:20240328T103526Z CATEGORIES;LANGUAGE=en-US:Seminars CONTACT: DESCRIPTION:Abstract\nThe field of NLP is in the midst of a disruptive shif t\, fueled most recently by the advent of large language models (LLMs)\, w ith impacts on our methodologies\, funding and public perception. While th e core technologies and scope of real-world impact of our field may be cha nging (everything is different!)\, many of the same key challenges faced s ince the inception of our field remain (nothing has changed). In this talk I’ll describe recent work characterizing and tackling some of these chall enges\, notably: data-efficient domain adaptation and lifelong learning. I will also anchor discussion of cycles and shifts in the field by describi ng findings from a qualitative study of factors shaping the community over time\, including culture\, incentives\, and infrastructure. Through these complementary lenses into the past\, present and future\, I aim to inspir e shared hope\, excitement and discussion. \nBio\nEmma Strubell is the Raj Reddy Assistant Professor in the Language Technologies Institute in the S chool of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University\, and a Visiting S cientist at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Previously sh e held research scientist roles at Google and FAIR after earning her docto ral degree in 2019 from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her resea rch lies at the intersection of natural language processing and machine le arning\, with a focus on providing pragmatic solutions to practitioners wh o wish to gain insights from natural language text via computation- and da ta-efficient AI. Her work has been recognized with a Madrona AI Impact Awa rd\, best paper awards at ACL and EMNLP\, and cited in news outlets includ ing the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20230925T120000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20230925T131500 LOCATION:Hackerman Hall B17 @ 3400 N. Charles Street\, Baltimore\, MD 21218 SEQUENCE:0 SUMMARY:Emma Strubell (Carnegie Mellon University) “Large Language Models: Everything’s Different and Nothing Has Changed” URL:https://www.clsp.jhu.edu/events/emma-strubell-carnegie-mellon-universit y/ X-COST-TYPE:free X-ALT-DESC;FMTTYPE=text/html:\\n\\n\\nAbstr act
\nThe field of NLP i s in the midst of a disruptive shift\, fueled most recently by the advent of large language models (LLMs)\, with impacts on our methodologies\, fund ing and public perception. While the core technologies and scope of real-w orld impact of our field may be changing (everything is different!)\, many of the same key challenges faced since the inception of our field remain (nothing has changed). In this talk I’ll describe recent work characterizi ng and tackling some of these challenges\, notably: data-efficient domain adaptation and lifelong learning. I will also anchor discussion of cycles and shifts in the field by describing findings from a qualitative study of factors shaping the community over time\, including culture\, incentives\ , and infrastructure. Through these complementary lenses into the past\, p resent and future\, I aim to inspire shared hope\, excitement and discussi on.
\nBio
\n< span class='x_x_x_ContentPasted1'>Emma Strubell is the Raj Reddy Assistant Professor in the Language Technologies Institute in the School of Compute r Science at Carnegie Mellon University\, and a Visiting Scientist at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Previously she held research scientist roles at Google and FAIR after earning her doctoral degree in 20 19 from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research lies at the intersection of natural language processing and machine learning\, with a focus on providing pragmatic solutions to practitioners who wish to gain i nsights from natural language text via computation- and data-efficient AI. Her work has been recognized with a Madrona AI Impact Award\, best paper awards at ACL and EMNLP\, and cited in news outlets including the New York Times and Wall Street Journal.
\n X-TAGS;LANGUAGE=en-US:2023\,September\,Strubell END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT UID:ai1ec-23898@www.clsp.jhu.edu DTSTAMP:20240328T103526Z CATEGORIES;LANGUAGE=en-US:Student Seminars CONTACT: DESCRIPTION:Abstract\nAny valuable NLP dataset has traditionally been shipp ed with crowdsourced categorical labels. Instructions for collecting these labels are easy to communicate and the labels themselves are easy to anno tate. However\, as self-supervision based methods are getting better at ba sically everything\, human annotations may need to provide more nuanced su pervision or enable more detailed evaluation in order to be worth further collecting. One natural extension to existing categorical annotation schem es is to obtain uncertainty information beyond a single hard label. In thi s talk\, I will discuss my recent efforts on introducing scalar labels in place of categorical labels as a form of uncertainty annotation. We demons trate that\, compared to other more obvious annotation schemes for eliciti ng uncertainty information\, scalar labels are significantly more cost-eff ective to annotate\, provide reliable evaluation\, and have a theoretical connection to existing predictive uncertainty metrics. In particular\, the y motivate using other losses as surrogates for calibration evaluation. DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20230929T120000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20230929T131500 LOCATION:Hackerman Hall B17 @ 3400 N. Charles Street\, Baltimore\, MD 21218 SEQUENCE:0 SUMMARY:CLSP Student Seminar – Zhengping Jiang “Scalar Labels for Capturing Human Uncertainty” URL:https://www.clsp.jhu.edu/events/clsp-student-seminar-zhengping-jiang/ X-COST-TYPE:free X-ALT-DESC;FMTTYPE=text/html:\\n\\n\\nAbstr act
\nAny valuable NLP d ataset has traditionally been shipped with crowdsourced categorical labels . Instructions for collecting these labels are easy to communicate and the labels themselves are easy to annotate. However\, as self-supervision bas ed methods are getting better at basically everything\, human annotations may need to provide more nuanced supervision or enable more detailed evalu ation in order to be worth further collecting. One natural extension to ex isting categorical annotation schemes is to obtain uncertainty information beyond a single hard label. In this talk\, I will discuss my recent effor ts on introducing scalar labels in place of categorical labels as a form o f uncertainty annotation. We demonstrate that\, compared to other more obv ious annotation schemes for eliciting uncertainty information\, scalar lab els are significantly more cost-effective to annotate\, provide reliable e valuation\, and have a theoretical connection to existing predictive uncer tainty metrics. In particular\, they motivate using other losses as surrog ates for calibration evaluation.
\n X-TAGS;LANGUAGE=en-US:2023\,Jiang\,September END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT UID:ai1ec-24241@www.clsp.jhu.edu DTSTAMP:20240328T103526Z CATEGORIES;LANGUAGE=en-US:Seminars CONTACT: DESCRIPTION:Abstract\nOur research focuses on improving speech processing a lgorithms\, such as automatic speech recognition (ASR)\, speaker identific ation\, and depression detection\, under challenging conditions such as li mited data (for example\, children’s or clinical speech)\, mismatched cond itions (for example\, training on read speech while recognizing conversati onal speech)\, and noisy speech\, using a hybrid data-driven and knowledge -based approach. This approach requires understanding of both machine lear ning approaches and of the human speech production and perception systems. I will summarize in this talk our work on children’s ASR using self-super vised models\, detecting depression from speech signals using novel speake r disentaglement techniques\, and automating scoring of children’s reading tasks with both ASR and innovative NLP algorithms.\nBiography\nAbeer Alwa n received her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from M IT in 1992. Since then\, she has been with the ECE department at UCLA wher e she is now a Full Professor and directs the Speech Processing and Audito ry Perception Laboratory. She is the recipient of the NSF Research Initiat ion and Career Awards\, NIH FIRST Award\, UCLA-TRW Excellence in Teaching Award\, Okawa Foundation Award in Telecommunication\, and the Engineer’s C ouncil Educator Award. She is a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of Americ a\, IEEE\, and International Speech Communication Assoc. (ISCA). She was a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute\, Harvard University\, co-Editor in Chi ef of Speech Communication\, Associate Editor of JASA and IEEE TSALP\, a D istinguished Lecturer of ISCA\, a member of the IEEE Signal Processing Boa rd of Governers and she is currently on the advisory board of ISCA and the UCLA-Amazon Science Hub for Humanity and AI. DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20240202T120000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20240202T131500 LOCATION:Hackerman Hall B17 @ 3400 N. Charles Street\, Baltimore\, MD 21218 SEQUENCE:0 SUMMARY:Abeer Alwan (UCLA) “Dealing with Limited Speech Data and Variabilit y: Three case studies” URL:https://www.clsp.jhu.edu/events/abeer-alwan-ucla/ X-COST-TYPE:free X-ALT-DESC;FMTTYPE=text/html:\\n\\n\\nAbstr act
\nOur research focuses on improving speech processing a lgorithms\, such as automatic speech recognition (ASR)\, speaker identific ation\, and depression detection\, under challenging conditions such as li mited data (for example\, children’s or clinical speech)\, mismatched cond itions (for example\, training on read speech while recognizing conversati onal speech)\, and noisy speech\, using a hybrid data-driven and knowledge -based approach. This approach requires understanding of both machine lear ning approaches and of the human speech production and perception systems. I will summarize in this talk our work on children’s ASR using self-super vised models\, detecting depression from speech signals using novel speake r disentaglement techniques\, and automating scoring of children’s reading tasks with both ASR and innovative NLP algorithms.
\nBiogra phy
\nAbeer Alwan received her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineer ing and Computer Science from MIT in 1992. Since then\, she has been with the ECE department at UCLA where she is now a Full Professor and directs t he Speech Processing and Auditory Perception Laboratory. She is the recipi ent of the NSF Research Initiation and Career Awards\, NIH FIRST Award\, U CLA-TRW Excellence in Teaching Award\, Okawa Foundation Award in Telecommu nication\, and the Engineer’s Council Educator Award. She is a Fellow of t he Acoustical Society of America\, IEEE\, and International Speech Communi cation Assoc. (ISCA). She was a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute\, Harvar d University\, co-Editor in Chief of Speech Communication\, Associate Edit or of JASA and IEEE TSALP\, a Distinguished Lecturer of ISCA\, a member of the IEEE Signal Processing Board of Governers and she is currently on the advisory board of ISCA and the UCLA-Amazon Science Hub for Humanity and A I.
\n X-TAGS;LANGUAGE=en-US:2024\,Alwan\,February END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT UID:ai1ec-24425@www.clsp.jhu.edu DTSTAMP:20240328T103526Z CATEGORIES;LANGUAGE=en-US:Student Seminars CONTACT: DESCRIPTION:Abstract\n\nOver the past three decades\, the fields of automat ic speech recognition (ASR) and machine translation (MT) have witnessed re markable advancements\, leading to exciting research directions such as sp eech-to-text translation (ST). This talk will delve into the domain of con versational ST\, an essential facet of daily communication\, which present s unique challenges including spontaneous informal language\, the presence of disfluencies\, high context dependence and a scarcity of ST paired dat a.\n\nConversational speech is notably characterized by its reliance on sh ort segments\, requiring the integration of broader contexts to maintain c onsistency and improve the translation’s fluency and quality. Incorporati ng longer contexts has been shown to benefit machine translation\, but the inclusion of context in E2E-ST remains under-studied. Previous approaches have used simple concatenation of audio inputs for context\, leading to m emory bottlenecks\, especially in self-attention networks\, due to the enc oding of lengthy audio segments.\n\nFirst\, I will describe how to integra te the context into E2E-ST with minimum additional memory cost. Then\, I will discuss the challenges of incorporating context in an E2E-ST system w ith limited data during training and inference and propose solutions to ov ercome them. Afterward\, I will illustrate the impact of context size and the inclusion of speaker information on performance. Lastly\, I will demon strate the benefits of context in conversational settings focusing on asp ects like anaphora resolution and the identification of named entities. DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20240205T120000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20240205T131500 LOCATION:Hackerman Hall B17 @ 3400 N. Charles Street\, Baltimore\, MD 21218 SEQUENCE:0 SUMMARY:Amir Hussein “Towards End-to-End Conversational Speech Translation” URL:https://www.clsp.jhu.edu/events/amir-hussein-towards-end-to-end-convers ational-speech-translation/ X-COST-TYPE:free X-ALT-DESC;FMTTYPE=text/html:\\n\\n\\nAbstr
act
\n
Over the past three decades\, the fields of automatic speech recognition (ASR) and machine tra nslation (MT) have witnessed remarkable advancements\, leading to exciting research directions such as speech-to-text translation (ST). This talk wi ll delve into the domain of conversational ST\, an essential facet of dail y communication\, which presents unique challenges including spontaneous i nformal language\, the presence of disfluencies\, high context dependence and a scarcity of ST paired data.
\n\nAbstr act
\nThere is an enormous data gap between how AI systems and children learn language: The best LLMs now learn language from text with a word count in the trillions\, whereas it would take a child roughly 100K years to reach those numbers through speec h (Frank\, 2023\, “Bridging the data gap”). There is also a clear generali zation gap: whereas machines struggle with systematic generalization\, peo ple excel. For instance\, once a child learns how to “skip\,” they immedia tely know how to “skip twice” or “skip around the room with their hands up ” due to their compositional skills. In this talk\, I’ll describe two case studies in addressing these gaps:
\n1) The dat a gap: We train deep neural networks from scratch (using DINO\, CLIP\, etc .)\, not on large-scale data from the web\, but through the eyes and ears of a single child. Using head-mounted video recordings from a child (61 ho urs of video slices over 19 months)\, we show how deep neural networks can acquire many word-referent mappings\, generalize to novel visual referent s\, and achieve multi-modal alignment. Our results demonstrate how today’s AI models are capable of learning key aspects of children’s early knowled ge from realistic input.
\n2) The generalizatio n gap: Can neural networks capture human-like systematic generalization? W e address a 35-year-old debate catalyzed by Fodor and Pylyshyn’s classic a rticle\, which argued that standard neural networks are not viable models of the mind because they lack systematic compositionality — the algebraic ability to understand and produce novel combinations from known components . We’ll show how neural network can achieve human-like systematic generali zation when trained through meta-learning for compositionality (MLC)\, a n ew method for optimizing the compositional skills of neural networks throu gh practice. With MLC\, a neural network can match human performance and s olve several machine learning benchmarks.
\nGiv en this work\, we’ll discuss the paths forward for building machines that learn\, generalize\, and interact in more human-like ways based on more na tural input.
\nRelated articles:
\nVong\, W. K.\, Wang\, W.\, Orhan\, A. E.\, and Lake\, B. M (2024). Grounded language acquisition through the eyes and ears of a singl e child. Science\, 383.
\nOrhan\, A. E.\ , and Lake\, B. M. (in press). Learning high-level visual representations from a child’s perspective without strong inductive biases. Nature Mach ine Intelligence.
\nLake\, B. M. and Baroni \, M. (2023). Human-like systematic generalization through a meta-learning neural network. Nature\, 623\, 115-121.
\nBiography< /strong>
\nBrenden M. Lake is an Assistant Prof essor of Psychology and Data Science at New York University. He received h is M.S. and B.S. in Symbolic Systems from Stanford University in 2009\, an d his Ph.D. in Cognitive Science from MIT in 2014. He was a postdoctoral D ata Science Fellow at NYU from 2014-2017. Brenden is a recipient of the Ro bert J. Glushko Prize for Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation in Cognitive S cience\, he is a MIT Technology Review Innovator Under 35\, and his resear ch was selected by Scientific American as one of the 10 most important adv ances of 2016. Brenden’s research focuses on computational problems that a re easier for people than they are for machines\, such as learning new con cepts\, creating new concepts\, learning-to-learn\, and asking questions.< /p>\n
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\nLarge language models like ChatGPT have shown extraor dinary abilities for writing. While impressive at first glance\, large lan guage models aren’t perfect and often make mistakes humans would not make. The main architecture behind ChatGPT mostly doesn’t differ from early neu ral networks\, and as a consequence\, carries some of the same limitations . My work revolves around the use of neural networks like ChatGPT mixed wi th symbolic methods from early AI and how these two families of methods ca n combine to create more robust AI. I talk about some of the neurosymbolic methods I used for applications in story generation and understanding — w ith the goal of eventually creating AI that can play Dungeons & Dragons. I also discuss pain points that I found for improving accessible communicat ion and show how large language models can supplement such communication.< /p>\n
Biography
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\nWe introduce STAR (Stream Transduction with Anchor Re presentations)\, a novel Transformer-based model designed for efficient se quence-to-sequence transduction over streams. STAR dynamically segments in put streams to create compressed anchor representations\, achieving nearly lossless compression (12x) in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and outp erforming existing methods. Moreover\, STAR demonstrates superior segmenta tion and latency-quality trade-offs in simultaneous speech-to-text tasks\, optimizing latency\, memory footprint\, and quality.
\n X-TAGS;LANGUAGE=en-US:2024\,February\,Tan END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT UID:ai1ec-24429@www.clsp.jhu.edu DTSTAMP:20240328T103526Z CATEGORIES;LANGUAGE=en-US:Seminars CONTACT: DESCRIPTION:Abstract\nI discuss the application of Foundation Models in Ast ronomy through the collaborative efforts of the UniverseTBD consortium wit h a mission to democratize Science for everyone. One of our key objectives is to overcome the limitations of general-purpose Foundation Models\, suc h as producing limited information in specialized fields. To this end\, we have developed the first specialized large language model for Astronomy\, AstroLLaMa-1. This model\, enhanced by exposure to domain-specific litera ture from the NASA Astrophysics Data System and ArXiv\, demonstrates impro ved text completion and embedding capabilities over existent GPT models. I further discuss the potential of LLMs in generating complex scientific hy potheses and extracting meaningful insights from astronomy literature. Our findings\, validated by human experts\, demonstrate the LLM capability in informed scientific critique and uncover intriguing patterns in the embed ding space\, highlighting the potential of LLMs to augment scientific inqu iry. I will also discuss preliminary work with the multi-modal model Astro LLaVA\, which allows us to interact with astronomical images via natural l anguage. Through the work of UniverseTBD\, we aim to explore how artificia l intelligence can assist human intelligence in Astronomy and\, more broad ly\, Science.\nBiography\nIoana Ciucă\, who goes by Jo\, is an interdiscip linary Jubilee Joint Fellow at the Australian National University\, workin g across the School of Computing and the Research School of Astronomy & As trophysics. Before joining ANU\, Jo finished her PhD in Astrophysics at Un iversity College London in the United Kingdom\, where she worked at the in tersection of Astronomy and Machine Learning to understand the formation a nd evolution history of our Galaxy\, the Milky Way. Jo is now focusing on utilizing foundation models that benefit researchers everywhere\, working alongside the UniverseTBD team of more than 30 astronomers\, engineers\, M L practitioners and enthusiasts worldwide.\n DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20240223T120000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20240223T131500 LOCATION:Hackerman Hall B17 @ 3400 N. Charles Street\, Baltimore\, MD 21218 SEQUENCE:0 SUMMARY:Ioana Ciuca (Australian National University)”A Universe To Be Decid ed: Towards Specialized Foundation Models for Advancing Astronomy” URL:https://www.clsp.jhu.edu/events/ioana-ciuca-australian-national-univers ity/ X-COST-TYPE:free X-ALT-DESC;FMTTYPE=text/html:\\n\\n\\nAbstr act
\nI discuss the application of Foundation Models in Ast ronomy through the collaborative efforts of the UniverseTBD consortium wit h a mission to democratize Science for everyone. One of our key objectives is to overcome the limitations of general-purpose Foundation Models\, suc h as producing limited information in specialized fields. To this end\, we have developed the first specialized large language model for Astronomy\, AstroLLaMa-1. This model\, enhanced by exposure to domain-specific litera ture from the NASA Astrophysics Data System and ArXiv\, demonstrates impro ved text completion and embedding capabilities over existent GPT models. I further discuss the potential of LLMs in generating complex scientific hy potheses and extracting meaningful insights from astronomy literature. Our findings\, validated by human experts\, demonstrate the LLM capability in informed scientific critique and uncover intriguing patterns in the embed ding space\, highlighting the potential of LLMs to augment scientific inqu iry. I will also discuss preliminary work with the multi-modal model Astro LLaVA\, which allows us to interact with astronomical images via natural l anguage. Through the work of UniverseTBD\, we aim to explore how artificia l intelligence can assist human intelligence in Astronomy and\, more broad ly\, Science.
\nBiography
\nIoana Ciucă\, who goes by Jo\, is an interdisciplinary Jubilee Joint Fellow at the Australi an National University\, working across the School of Computing and the Re search School of Astronomy & Astrophysics. Before joining ANU\, Jo finishe d her PhD in Astrophysics at University College London in the United Kingd om\, where she worked at the intersection of Astronomy and Machine Learnin g to understand the formation and evolution history of our Galaxy\, the Mi lky Way. Jo is now focusing on utilizing foundation models that benefit re searchers everywhere\, working alongside the UniverseTBD team of more than 30 astronomers\, engineers\, ML practitioners and enthusiasts worldwide.< /p>\n
\n X-TAGS;LANGUAGE=en-US:2024\,Ciuca\,February END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT UID:ai1ec-24457@www.clsp.jhu.edu DTSTAMP:20240328T103526Z CATEGORIES;LANGUAGE=en-US:Student Seminars CONTACT: DESCRIPTION:Abstract\nAs artificial intelligence (AI) continues to rapidly expand into existing healthcare infrastructure – e.g.\, clinical decision support\, administrative tasks\, and public health surveillance – it is pe rhaps more important than ever to reflect on the broader purpose of such s ystems. While much focus has been on the potential for this technology to improve general health outcomes\, there also exists a significant\, but un derstated\, opportunity to use this technology to address health-related d isparities. Accomplishing the latter depends not only on our ability to ef fectively identify addressable areas of systemic inequality and translate them into tasks that are machine learnable\, but also our ability to measu re\, interpret\, and counteract barriers in training data that may inhibit robustness to distribution shift upon deployment (i.e.\, new populations\ , temporal dynamics). In this talk\, we will discuss progress made along b oth of these dimensions. We will begin by providing background on the stat e of AI for promoting health equity. Then\, we will present results from a recent clinical phenotyping project and discuss their implication on prev ailing views regarding language model robustness in clinical applications. Finally\, we will showcase ongoing efforts to proactively address systemi c inequality in healthcare by identifying and characterizing stigmatizing language in medical records. DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20240226T120000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20240226T131500 LOCATION:Hackerman Hall B17 @ 3400 N. Charles Street\, Baltimore\, MD 21218 SEQUENCE:0 SUMMARY:Keith Harrigian (JHU) “Fighting Bias From Bias: Robust Natural Lang uage Processing Techniques to Promote Health Equity” URL:https://www.clsp.jhu.edu/events/keith-harrigian-jhu-fighting-bias-from- bias-robust-natural-language-processing-techniques-to-promote-health-equit y/ X-COST-TYPE:free X-ALT-DESC;FMTTYPE=text/html:\\n\\n\\n
Abstr act
\nAs artificial intelligence (AI) continues to rapidly expand into existing healthcare infrastructure – e.g.\, clinical decision support\, administrative tasks\, and public health surveillance – it is pe rhaps more important than ever to reflect on the broader purpose of such s ystems. While much focus has been on the potential for this technology to improve general health outcomes\, there also exists a significant\, but un derstated\, opportunity to use this technology to address health-related d isparities. Accomplishing the latter depends not only on our ability to ef fectively identify addressable areas of systemic inequality and translate them into tasks that are machine learnable\, but also our ability to measu re\, interpret\, and counteract barriers in training data that may inhibit robustness to distribution shift upon deployment (i.e.\, new populations\ , temporal dynamics). In this talk\, we will discuss progress made along b oth of these dimensions. We will begin by providing background on the stat e of AI for promoting health equity. Then\, we will present results from a recent clinical phenotyping project and discuss their implication on prev ailing views regarding language model robustness in clinical applications. Finally\, we will showcase ongoing efforts to proactively address systemi c inequality in healthcare by identifying and characterizing stigmatizing language in medical records.
\n X-TAGS;LANGUAGE=en-US:2024\,February\,Harrigian END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR