[Theory] REMINDER: 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.

*Bio: *Najoung Kim is a PhD student in the Department of Cognitive Science
at Johns Hopkins University, advised by Paul Smolensky and Kyle Rawlins.
Her research is on diagnosing current natural language understanding
systems to propose targeted solutions, leveraging insights from linguistics
and cognitive science. In particular, she focuses on the understanding of
implicit meaning and systematic generalization. Najoung's dissertation work
is supported by the NSF, and she has interned at Google and IBM Research.



*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>*


On Thu, Jan 14, 2021 at 10:53 PM Mary Marre <mmarre at ttic.edu> wrote:

> *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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