[Theory] 10/24 TTIC Colloquium: Yoav Artzi, Cornell University

[Mary Marre]

*When:*        Monday, October 24th at* 11:30 am CT*


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

                   TTIC, 6045 S. Kenwood Avenue

                   5th Floor, Room 530


*Virtually:*  via Panopto (*livestream*
<https://uchicago.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=8427a25d-71ee-4e3f-8d10-af32012a1053>
)


*Who: *        Yoav Artzi, Cornell University


------------------------------

*Title:         *Interaction and Natural Language Learning
*Abstract: *This talk focuses on the challenges and opportunities that
interactions provide for natural language learning. It is divided into two
parts. First, I will show how collaborative interactions enable continual
learning, where agentive systems improve over time through interaction. I
will describe an interactive game-like environment that instantiates
collaborative interactions with natural language coordination, and show how
it creates a contextual bandit learning scenario for language production
(i.e., generation). I will also briefly show how this formulation
generalizes to language comprehension. In the second part, I will discuss
language-conditioned reinforcement learning (RL). Although the pairing of
natural language and RL is promising for both research and application, it
is a research avenue that remains challenging to pursue. I will describe a
new approach for language-conditioned RL benchmarking that strikes a
balance between research accessibility and retaining the complexities and
nuances of natural language.

*Bio: **Yoav** Artzi* is an Associate Professor in the Department of
Computer Science and Cornell Tech at Cornell University. His research
focuses on developing learning methods for natural language understanding
and generation in automated interactive systems. He received an NSF CAREER
award, and his work was acknowledged by awards and honorable mentions at
ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, and IROS. Yoav holds a B.Sc. from Tel Aviv University
and a Ph.D. from the University of Washington.

*Host: Karen Livescu <klivescu at ttic.edu>*

***********************************************************************************

For more information on the colloquium series or to subscribe to the
mailing list, please see http://www.ttic.edu/colloquium.php


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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