Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for February
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NL SEMINAR-From Human Language to Agent Action
Thu, Feb 04, 2021 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Jesse Thomason, USC CS/Amazon Alexa
Talk Title: From Human Language to Agent Action
Abstract: There is a usability gap between manipulation capable robots and helpful in home digital agents. Dialog enabled smart assistants have recently seen widespread adoption, but these cannot move or manipulate objects. By contrast, manipulation-capable and mobile robots are still largely deployed in industrial settings and do not interact with human users. Language enabled robots can bridge this gap natural language interfaces help robots and non-experts collaborate to achieve their goals. Navigation in unexplored environments to high level targets like Go to the room with a plant can be facilitated by enabling agents to ask questions and react to human clarifications on the fly. Further, high level instructions like Put a plate of toast on the table require inferring many steps, from finding a knife to operating a toaster. Low level instructions can serve to clarify these individual steps. Through two new datasets and accompanying models, we study human human dialog for cooperative navigation, and high and low level language instructions for cooking, cleaning, and tidying in interactive home environments. These datasets are a first step towards collaborative, dialog enabled robots helpful in human spaces.
Biography: Jesse is starting as an Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California in fall 2021, and is currently hanging out at Amazon Alexa AI for a year. Recently, he was a postdoctoral researcher working with Luke Zettlemoyer at the University of Washington. His research focuses on language grounding and natural language processing applications for robotics RoboNLP. Key to this work is using dialog with humans to facilitate both robot task execution and learning to enable lifelong improvement of robots language understanding capabilities. He has encouraged work in RoboNLP through workshop organization at NLP, robotics, and vision conference venues.
Host: Jon May and Mozhdeh Gheini
More Info: https://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
Webcast: https://youtu.be/vSLk1T48WToLocation: Information Science Institute (ISI) - Virtual Only
WebCast Link: https://youtu.be/vSLk1T48WTo
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Petet Zamar
Event Link: https://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor. -
NL Seminar-Insights from Re-evaluating NLP Systems
Thu, Feb 25, 2021 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Robin Jia, USC CS
Talk Title: Insights from Re-evaluating NLP Systems
Series: NL Seminar
Abstract: *This Talk Will Not Be Recorded*
Although large pre trained models have achieved exceptional results on standard NLP benchmarks, it is clear that they are still far from actually understanding natural language. This gap highlights the need to develop and embrace more challenging settings for evaluation. In this talk, I will present work that re evaluates seemingly high performing NLP systems and derives insights on how these systems can be further improved. First, we will evaluate models under extreme label imbalance, a phenomenon that creates unavoidable train test mismatch. Here, collecting training data adaptively leads to dramatic improvements over static data collection. Second, we will grapple with adversarial perturbations label preserving transformations that can trigger surprising model errors. We will develop training methods to make models certifiably robust to combinatorially large families of perturbations. Finally, we will assess the utility of automatic evaluation metrics for comparing NLG systems. We will show that metrics can be surprisingly competitive with evaluation schemes that rely on human annotators, and highlight reduction of statistical bias against particular NLG systems as an important future direction.
Biography: Robin Jia will be an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at the University of Southern California starting in Fall 2021. Currently, he is a visiting researcher at Facebook AI Research, working with Luke Zettlemoyer and Douwe Kiela. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University, where he was advised by Percy Liang.
He is interested broadly in natural language processing and machine learning, with a particular focus on building NLP systems that are robust to distribution shift. Robins work has received an Outstanding Paper Award at EMNLP 2017 and a Best Short Paper award at ACL 2018.
Host: Jon May and Mozhdeh Gheini
More Info: https://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
Webcast: NALocation: Information Science Institute (ISI) - Virtual Only: This Talk Will Not Be Recorded
WebCast Link: NA
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Petet Zamar
Event Link: https://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor.
