NW-NLP 2018: Ben Taskar Invited Talk; Learning and Reasoning about the World using Language

The fifth Pacific Northwest Regional Natural Language Processing Workshop will be held on Friday, April 27, 2018, in Redmond, WA. We accepted abstracts and papers on all aspects of natural language text and speech processing, computational linguistics, and human language technologies.

As with past four workshops, the goal of this one-day NW-NLP event is to provide a less-formal setting in the Pacific Northwest to present research ideas, make new acquaintances, and learn about the breadth of exciting work currently being pursued in North-West area.

Learning and Reasoning about the World using Language

Understanding a narrative often requires reading between the lines, which in turn, requires rich background knowledge about how the world works. However, learning and reasoning about the obvious, but unspoken facts about the world is nontrivial, as people rarely state the obvious, e.g., “my house is bigger than me.” In this talk, I will discuss how we can reverse engineer aspects of commonsense knowledge—ranging from Naive Physics type knowledge to more abstract social commonsense—from how people use language. I will then discuss neural network architectures that can provide structural priors to understand the latent process underlying a procedural text through (neural) simulation of action dynamics. I will conclude the talk by discussing the challenges in current models and formalisms, pointing to avenues for future research.

Afternoon Talks

Title: Annotation Artifacts in Natural Language Inference Data
Speakers: Suchin Gururangan, Swabha Swayamdipta, Omer Levy, Roy Schwartz, Samuel Bowman and Noah Smith

Title: Simulating Action Dynamics with Neural Process Networks
Speakers: Antoine Bosselut, Omer Levy, Ari Holtzman, Corin Ennis, Dieter Fox and Yejin Choi

For more information, schedule, abstracts, etc, please visit the website: https://sites.google.com/view/nwnlp18/home (opens in new tab)

Speaker Details

Yejin Choi is an associate professor of Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington and also a senior research manager at AI2. Her research interests include language grounding with vision, physical and social commonsense, language generation with long-term coherence, conversational AI, and AI for social good. She was among the IEEE’s AI Top 10 to Watch in 2015, a co-recipient of the Marr Prize at ICCV 2013, and a faculty advisor for the Sounding Board team that won the inaugural Alexa Prize Challenge in 2017. Her work on detecting deceptive reviews, predicting the literary success, and interpreting bias and connotation has been featured by numerous media outlets including NBC News for New York, NPR Radio, New York Times, and Bloomberg Business Week. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science at Cornell University.

Date:
Speakers:
Yejin Choi
Affiliation:
University of Washington & Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence