[Theory] 2/18 Talks at TTIC: Maarten Sap, University of Washington

[Mary Marre]

*When:*      Thursday, February 18th at* 11:10 am CT*



*Where:*     Zoom Virtual Talk (*register in advance here
<https://uchicagogroup.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_FazOKn7bRGq8UdxYLJta_g>*)



*Who: *       Maarten Sap, University of Washington


*Title:        *Positive AI with Social Commonsense Models

*Abstract:*
To effectively understand language and safely communicate with humans,
machines must not only grasp the surface meanings of texts, but also their
underlying social meaning. This requires understanding interpersonal social
commonsense, such as knowing to thank someone for giving you a present, as
well as understanding harmful social biases and stereotypes. Failure to
account for these social and power dynamics could cause models to produce
redundant, rude, or even harmful outputs.

In this talk, I will describe my research on enabling machines to reason
about social dynamics and social biases in text. I will first discuss
ATOMIC, the first large-scale knowledge graph of social and interpersonal
commonsense knowledge, with which machines can be taught to reason about
the causes and effects of everyday events. Then, I will show how we can
make machines understand and mitigate social biases in language, using
Social Bias Frames, a new structured formalism for distilling biased
implications of language, and PowerTransformer, a new unsupervised model
for controllable debiasing of text.

I will conclude with future research directions on making NLP systems more
socially-aware and equitable, and how to use language technologies for
positive societal impact.

*Bio:*
Maarten Sap is a final year PhD student in the University of Washington's
natural language processing (NLP) group, advised by Noah Smith and Yejin
Choi. His research focuses on making NLP systems socially intelligent, and
understanding social inequality and bias in language. He has presented his
work in top-tier NLP and AI conferences, receiving a best short paper
nomination at ACL 2019 and a best paper award at the WeCNLP 2020 summit.
Additionally, he and his team won the inaugural Amazon Alexa Prize, a
social chatbot competition. In the past, he has interned at the Allen
Institute for AI working on social commonsense reasoning, and at Microsoft
Research working on deep learning models for understanding human cognition.

*Host:* Karen Livescu <klivescu 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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