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Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for July
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NL Seminar-Towards interactive story generation
Thu, Jul 16, 2020 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Mohit Iyyer, U Mass (Amherst)
Talk Title: Towards interactive story generation
Abstract: Story generation is difficult to computationally formalize and evaluate, and there are many important questions to ask when tackling the problem. What should we consider as the base unit of a story e.g., a sentence? a paragraph? a chapter? What kind of data should we use to train these models novels? short stories? overly simplistic mechanically turked paragraphs?) Is any model architecture currently capable of producing long-form narratives that have some semblance of coherent discourse structure, such as plot arcs and character development? When evaluating the outputs of our models, can we do better than just asking people to rate the text based on vaguely defined properties such as enjoyability? In this talk, I'll discuss my lab's ongoing work on story generation by introducing a new dataset and evaluation method that we hope will spur progress in this area, and also describing fine-tuning strategies for large scale Transformers that produce more coherent and stylistically consistent stories. A major bottleneck of these models is their memory and speed inefficiency; as such, I'll conclude by discussing heavily simplified Transformer language models that make training less expensive without sacrificing output quality.
Biography: Mohit Iyyer is an assistant professor in computer science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His research focuses broadly on designing machine learning models for discourse level language generation e.g., for story generation and machine translation), and his group also works on tasks involving creative language understanding e.g., modeling fictional narratives and characters. He is the recipient of best paper awards at NAACL 2016, 2018 and a best demo award at NeurIPS 2015. He received his PhD in computer science from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2017, advised by Jordan Boyd Graber and Hal Daumé III, and spent the following year as a researcher at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence.
Host: Jon May and Emily Sheng
More Info: https://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - Meeting ID: 938 5732 1879 /Password: 073790
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Petet Zamar
Event Link: https://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
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Viterbi Summer Research PhD Panel
Wed, Jul 22, 2020 @ 12:00 PM - 02:00 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Student Affairs
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Andrea Armani & Dr. Krishna Nayak, University of Southern California
Talk Title: Applying for the PhD
Abstract: Seminar for students participating in the Viterbi Summer Research Program and the Summer Undergraduate Research (SURE) programs. Participants will gain first-hand information on how to create outstanding applications for PhD programs. Faculty members, Dr. Andrea Armani and Dr. Krishna Nayak will lead this seminar as experts providing insights into the process.
Host: Viterbi School of Engineering
Audiences: Invite Only
Contact: Viterbi Undergraduate Programs
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NL Seminar-A Typology of Ethical Risks in Language Technology with an Eye Towards Where Transparent Documentation Can Help
Thu, Jul 30, 2020 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Emily Bender, University of Washington
Talk Title: A Typology of Ethical Risks in Language Technology with an Eye Towards Where Transparent Documentation Can Help
Series: NL Seminar
Abstract: People are impacted by language technology in various ways: as direct users of the technology (by choice or otherwise), and indirectly, including as the subject of queries, as the subject of stereotypes, and as contributors to corpora. In these roles, risks are borne differentially by different speaker populations, depending on how well the technology works for their language varieties. This talk explores strategies for mitigating these risks based on transparent documentation of training data.
Biography: Emily M. Bender is a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Washington and the Faculty Director of the Professional Masters in Computational Linguistics CLMS program. Her research interests include the interaction of linguistics and NLP, computational semantics, multilingual NLP, and the societal impact of language technology.
Host: Jon May and Mozhdeh Gheini
More Info: https://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
Webcast: https://youtu.be/WIChyzXVNLYLocation: Information Science Institute (ISI) - Virtual Only
WebCast Link: https://youtu.be/WIChyzXVNLY
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Petet Zamar
Event Link: https://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
