[Colloquium] Professor Eunsol Choi: Knowledge-Rich Language Systems in a Dynamic World

[Abigail Santana]

Professor Eunsol Choi
Assistant Professor
University of Texas at Austin

Friday, February 23rd
11:00am - 12:00pm
In person: TTIC, 6045 S. Kenwood Avenue Room 529
Zoom: https://uchicago.zoom.us/j/98297764499?pwd=ajNQSTZnMHRmMENkd1hjdjlNeW1xdz09#success


Title: Knowledge- Rich Language Systems in a Dynamic World

Abstract: Natural language interfaces provide an intuitive and powerful tool to assess rich knowledge at scale. Modern language systems draw information from two rich knowledge sources: (1) information stored in its parameters during massive pretraining and (2) documents retrieved at inference time. Yet, we are far from building systems that can reliably provide information from such knowledge sources. Existing systems frequently fail to identify relevant information and provide outdated or incorrect information. In this talk, I will discuss solutions for a more robust system. In the first part of the talk, I will present a module for scaling retrieval-based knowledge augmentation. We learn a compressor that maps retrieved documents into textual summaries prior to in-context integration. This not only reduces the computational costs but also filters irrelevant or incorrect information. In the second half of the talk, I will first discuss the challenges of updating knowledge stored in model parameters and propose a method to prevent models from reciting outdated information by identifying facts that are prone to rapid change. I will conclude my talk by proposing an interactive system that can elicit information from users when needed.

Bio: Eunsol Choi is an assistant professor in the Computer Science department at the University of Texas at Austin. Prior to UT, she spent a year at Google AI as a visiting researcher. Her research area spans natural language processing and machine learning. She is particularly interested in interpreting and reasoning about text in a dynamic real world context. She is a recipient of a Facebook research fellowship, Google faculty research award, Sony faculty award, and an outstanding paper award at EMNLP. She received a Ph.D. in computer science and engineering from University of Washington and B.A in mathematics and computer science from Cornell University.





Abigail Santana
Business Assistant - Computer Science
The University of Chicago
5730 S Ellis Ave, JCL 212
Chicago, IL 60637
asantana01 at uchicago.edu
Office: 773-834-2750

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