[Theory] 1/21 Talks at TTIC: Najoung Kim, John Hopkins University

[Mary Marre]

*When:*      Thursday, January 21st at* 11:10 am CT*



*Where:*     Zoom Virtual Talk (*register in advance here
<https://uchicagogroup.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_jKnto66aRn-oINh-FV4Q8w>*)



*Who: *       Najoung Kim, John Hopkins University

*Title:        *What Aspects of Meaning are Missing from Current Natural
Language Understanding Systems?

*Abstract:* Natural Language Understanding (NLU) has progressed greatly in
the last several years, with models surpassing human performance on widely
used benchmarks such as SuperGLUE. In this talk, I highlight two aspects of
meaning that are still missing in our NLU systems despite their impressive
success. The first is systematic understanding: through a semantic parsing
task, I show that systems are biased towards assigning the meaning that
they have already encountered during training, even when the structure of
the sentence indicates otherwise. The second is understanding of
non-asserted meaning: in the context of question-answering, I demonstrate
that current systems are unable to handle questions containing failed
presuppositions (backgrounded assumptions that need to be satisfied) such
as *Which linguist invented the lightbulb?* sufficiently.

*Host: *Kevin Gimpel <kgimpel at ttic.edu>


Mary C. Marre
Faculty Administrative Support
*Toyota Technological Institute*
*6045 S. Kenwood Avenue*
*Room 517*
*Chicago, IL  60637*
*p:(773) 834-1757*
*f: (773) 357-6970*
*mmarre at ttic.edu <mmarre at ttic.edu>*
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