Events Calendar

NL Seminar Towards Flexible but Controllable Language Generation

Speaker: Yulia Tsvetkov , CMU

Talk Title: Towards Flexible but Controllable Language Generation

Series: Natural Language Seminar

Abstract: To enable naturalistic, context aware language generation, the underlying models must be flexible but controllable. They must be flexible enough to account for the rich linguistic diversity of data that the model generates and conditions on. On the other hand, generation must be controlled, to lexicalize the same meaning differently, depending upon the social and the situational context. I will present model based approaches to multilingual language modeling and open vocabulary machine translation, aiming at making language generation more flexible by relaxing the unreasonable but prevalent in the literature assumption that a models vocabulary is constrained to a particular set of most frequent words in a particular language. Then, I will present an approach to controllable text generation that modulates social variables in generated text. I will conclude with an overview of ongoing research projects.

Biography: Yulia Tsvetkov is an assistant professor in the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research interests lie at or near the intersection of natural language processing, machine learning, linguistics, and social science. Her current research projects focus on multilinguality e.g., open vocabulary machine translation, polyglot models, entrainment in code switching, controllable text generation, automated negotiation, and NLP for social good e.g., identification of microaggressions and dehumanization in online interactions, identification of misinformation and agenda setting in news, predicting scientific misconduct. Prior to joining LTI, Yulia was a postdoc in the department of Computer Science at Stanford University she received her PhD from Carnegie Mellon University.

Host: Nanyun Peng

More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/

Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th Flr Conf Rm # 1135, Marina Del Rey

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Peter Zamar

Event Link: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/