[Colloquium] TODAY (Now REMOTE ONLY): Data Science/CS Candidate Talk - Alane Suhr (Cornell)

[Rob Mitchum]

*Data Science Institute/Computer Science Candidate Seminar*

*Alane Suhr*
*PhD Candidate*
*Cornell University*

*Monday, March 28th*
*3:00 p.m. - 4:00 p.m.*
*REMOTE ONLY: Live Stream <http://live.cs.uchicago.edu/alanesuhr/> or Zoom
<https://uchicago.zoom.us/j/96377760382?pwd=QnRKa1d0ZkNBamw3SGJ3Q0lBRThzdz09>
(details
below)*


*Reasoning and Learning in Interactive Natural Language Systems*

Systems that support expressive, situated natural language interactions are
essential for expanding access to complex computing systems, such as robots
and databases, to non-experts. Reasoning and learning in such natural
language interactions is a challenging open problem. For example, resolving
sentence meaning requires reasoning not only about word meaning, but also
about the interaction context, including the history of the interaction and
the situated environment. In addition, the sequential dynamics that arise
between user and system in and across interactions make learning from
static data, i.e., supervised data, both challenging and ineffective.
However, these same interaction dynamics result in ample opportunities for
learning from implicit and explicit feedback that arises naturally in the
interaction. This lays the foundation for systems that continually learn,
improve, and adapt their language use through interaction, without
additional annotation effort. In this talk, I will focus on these
challenges and opportunities. First, I will describe our work on modeling
dependencies between language meaning and interaction context when mapping
natural language in interaction to executable code. In the second part of
the talk, I will describe our work on language understanding and generation
in collaborative interactions, focusing on continual learning from explicit
and implicit user feedback.

*Bio*: Alane Suhr <https://www.alanesuhr.com/> is a PhD Candidate in the
Department of Computer Science at Cornell University, advised by Yoav
Artzi. Her research spans natural language processing, machine learning,
and computer vision, with a focus on building systems that participate and
continually learn in situated natural language interactions with human
users. Alane’s work has been recognized by paper awards at ACL and NAACL,
and has been supported by fellowships and grants, including an NSF Graduate
Research Fellowship, a Facebook PhD Fellowship, and research awards from
AI2, ParlAI, and AWS. Alane has also co-organized multiple workshops and
tutorials appearing at NeurIPS, EMNLP, NAACL, and ACL. Previously, Alane
received a BS in Computer Science and Engineering as an Eminence Fellow at
the Ohio State University.

*Host*: Chenhao Tan

*Zoom Info:*
https://uchicago.zoom.us/j/96377760382?pwd=QnRKa1d0ZkNBamw3SGJ3Q0lBRThzdz09
Meeting ID: 963 7776 0382
Password: ds2022
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.cs.uchicago.edu/pipermail/colloquium/attachments/20220328/7343247b/attachment.html>