[Theory] 3/2 Talks at TTIC: Alane Suhr, Cornell University

[Mary Marre]

*When:*        Wednesday, March 2nd at* 11:30 am CT*


*Where:       *Talk will be given *live, in-person* at

                   TTIC, 6045 S. Kenwood Avenue

                   5th Floor, Room 530


*Where:*       Zoom Virtual Talk (*register in advance here
<https://uchicagogroup.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_bA-GXT9mRnu7oUJXbbBKXA>*)


*Who: *         Alane Suhr, Cornell University




*Title:         *Reasoning and Learning in Interactive Natural Language
Systems

*Abstract: *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 environments, focusing on
learning to recover from errors and on continual learning from explicit and
implicit user feedback.

*Bio: *Alane Suhr 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:* Karen Livescu <klivescu at ttic.edu>*





Mary C. Marre
Faculty Administrative Support
*Toyota Technological Institute*
*6045 S. Kenwood Avenue*
*Chicago, IL  60637*
*mmarre at ttic.edu <mmarre at ttic.edu>*
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