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Generative models for Conversational AI are less than a decade old,  but they hold great promise for human-machine interactions. Machine responses based on generative models can seem quite fluent and human-like, empathetic and funny, knowledgeable and professional. However, behind the confident voice of generative ConvAI systems, they can also be hallucinating misinformation, giving biased and harmful views, and are still not "safe" enough for many real life applications. The expressive power of generative ConvAI models and their undesirable behavior are two sides of the same coin. How can we harness the fluency, diversity, engagingness of generative ConvAI models while mitigating the downside? In this talk, I will present some of our team’s recent work in making generative ConvAI safer via mitigating hallucinations, misinformation, and toxicity.

Pascale Fung is a Chair Professor at the Department of Electronic & Computer Engineering at The Hong Kong University of Science & Technology (HKUST), and a visiting professor at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. She is an elected Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) for her "significant contributions to the field of conversational AI and to the development of ethical AI principles and algorithms", an elected Fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) for her “significant contributions towards statistical NLP, comparable corpora, and building intelligent systems that can understand and empathize with humans”. She is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) for her “contributions to human-machine interactions” and an elected Fellow of the International Speech Communication Association for “fundamental contributions to the interdisciplinary area of spoken language human-machine interactions”. She is the Director of HKUST Centre for AI Research (CAiRE). She was the founding chair of the Women Faculty Association at HKUST. She is an expert on the Global Future Council, a think tank for the World Economic Forum. She represents HKUST on Partnership on AI to Benefit People and Society. She is on the Board of Governors of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. She is a member of the IEEE Working Group to develop an IEEE standard - Recommended Practice for Organizational Governance of Artificial Intelligence. Her research team has won several best and outstanding paper awards at ACL, ACL and NeurIPS workshops.

Most work on scholarly document processing assumes that the information processed is trustworthy and factually correct. However, this is not always the case. There are two core challenges, which should be addressed: 1) ensuring that scientific publications are credible -- e.g. that claims are not made without supporting evidence, and that all relevant supporting evidence is provided; and 2) that scientific findings are not misrepresented, distorted or outright misreported when communicated by journalists or the general public. In this talk, I will present some first steps towards addressing these problems, discussing our research on exaggeration detection, scientific fact checking, and on modelling information change in scientific communication more broadly.

Isabelle Augenstein is a Professor at the University of Copenhagen, Department of Computer Science, where she heads the Copenhagen Natural Language Understanding research group as well as the Natural Language Processing section. Her main research interests are fact checking, low-resource learning, and explainability. Prior to starting a faculty position, she was a postdoctoral researcher at University College London, and before that a PhD student at the University of Sheffield. In October 2022, Isabelle Augenstein became Denmark’s youngest ever female full professor. She currently holds a prestigious ERC Starting Grant on 'Explainable and Robust Automatic Fact Checking', as well as the Danish equivalent of that, a DFF Sapere Aude Research Leader fellowship on 'Learning to Explain Attitudes on Social Media’. She is a member of the Young Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, and Vice President-Elect of SIGDAT, which organises the EMNLP conference series.

Recent advances in machine translation quality have improved its usefulness as a tool to satisfy the demand for multilingual information and communication. Machine translation is nowadays a common part of professional translation workflows, but it is not a tool exclusive to translators. Users of machine translation can be found, for example, in public service institutions and newsrooms looking to produce and disseminate information in multiple languages. At the same time, machine translation can also offer a way for people to access information that may not otherwise be available in their language. Effective and responsible use of machine translation, however, requires a clear understanding of the potential risks as well as potential benefits. In this talk, I discuss how machine translation is used for producing and accessing information and how various situational factors affect its use in different scenarios.

Dr Maarit Koponen currently works as Professor of Translation Studies at the University of Eastern Finland. She has previously worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki and as a lecturer at the University of Turku after receiving her PhD in Language Technology at the University of Helsinki in 2016. Her research focuses on translation technology, particularly machine translation, and the effect of technology on translation both in professional and non-professional settings. Starting in October 2022, Koponen leads a work package focusing on linguistic barriers to information accessibility and technological solutions as part of the research project DECA (Democratic epistemic capacities in the age of algorithms), funded by the Academy of Finland Strategic Research Council. She chairs Working Group 7 “Language work, language professionals” of the EU COST Action “Language in the Human-Machine Era” (LITHME). She has also worked as a professional translator for several years.

Current NLP systems impress us by achieving close-to-human performance on benchmarks of answering commonsense questions or writing interesting stories. However, most of the progress is evaluated using static, closed-ended datasets created for individual tasks. To deploy commonsense reasoning services in the wild, we look to develop and evaluate systems that can generate answers in an open-ended way, perform robust logical reasoning, and generalize across diverse task formats, domains, and datasets. In this talk I will share our effort on introducing new formulations of commonsense reasoning challenges and novel evaluation protocols, towards broadening the scope in approaching machine common sense. We hope that such a shift of evaluation paradigm would encourage more research on externalizing the model reasoning process and improving model robustness and cross-task generalization.

Xiang Ren is an assistant professor and Viterbi Early Career Chair at the USC Computer Science Department, a Research Team Leader at USC ISI, and the director of the Intelligence and Knowledge Discovery (INK) Lab at USC. Priorly, he spent time as a research scholar at Stanford University and received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Ren's research seeks to build generalizable natural language processing (NLP) systems which can handle a wide variety of language tasks and situations. He works on new algorithms and datasets to make NLP systems cheaper to develop and maintain, arm machine models with common sense, and improve models’ transparency and reliability to build user trust. His research work has received several best paper awards in top NLP and AI conference venues. Ren has been awarded a NSF CAREER Award, multiple faculty research awards from Google, Facebook, Amazon, JP Morgan and Sony, and the 2018 ACM SIGKDD Doctoral Dissertation Award. He was named Forbes' Asia 30 Under 30 in 2019.

Every once in a while, a new language model with gazillion parameters makes a big splash in Twitter, smashing the previous SOTA in some benchmarks or showing some impressive emerging capabilities. While some may argue that scaling will eventually solve NLP, others are skeptical about the scientific value of this trend. In this talk, I will argue that scaling is not just engineering, but also comes with exciting research questions. I will present some of our recent work in the topic, and discuss our efforts to make large language models more accessible for the community.

Mikel Artetxe is a Research Scientist at FAIR (Meta AI). His primary area of research is multilingual NLP. Mikel was one the pioneers of unsupervised machine translation, and has done extensive work on cross-lingual representation learning. More recently, he has also been working on natural language generation, few-shot learning, and large-scale language models. Prior to joining FAIR, Mikel did his PhD at the IXA group at the University of the Basque Country, and interned at DeepMind, FAIR and Google.

The fundamental issue underlying natural language understanding is that of semantics – there is a need to move toward understanding natural language at an appropriate level of abstraction in order to support natural language understanding and communication with computers. Machine Learning has become ubiquitous in our attempt to induce semantic representations of natural language and support decisions that depend on it; however, while we have made significant progress over the last few years, it has focused on classification tasks for which we have large amounts of annotated data. Supporting high level decisions that depend on natural language understanding is still beyond our capabilities, partly since most of these tasks are very sparse and generating supervision signals for it does not scale. I will discuss some of the challenges underlying reasoning – making natural language understanding decisions that depend on multiple, interdependent, models, and exemplify it mostly using the domain of Reasoning about Time, as it is expressed in natural language.

Dan Roth is the Eduardo D. Glandt Distinguished Professor at the Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania, lead of NLP Science at Amazon AWS AI, and a Fellow of the AAAS, the ACM, AAAI, and the ACL. In 2017, Roth was awarded the John McCarthy Award, the highest award the AI community gives to mid-career AI researchers. Roth was recognized “for major conceptual and theoretical advances in the modeling of natural language understanding, machine learning, and reasoning.” Roth has published broadly in machine learning, natural language processing, knowledge representation and reasoning, and learning theory, and has developed advanced machine learning based tools for natural language applications that are being used widely. Roth was the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR) and a program chair of AAAI, ACL, and CoNLL. Roth has been involved in several startups; most recently he was a co-founder and chief scientist of NexLP, a startup that leverages the latest advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP), Cognitive Analytics, and Machine Learning in the legal and compliance domains. NexLP was acquired by Reveal in 2020. Prof. Roth received his B.A Summa cum laude in Mathematics from the Technion, Israel, and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Harvard University in 1995.

Recent years have seen considerable progress in the deployment of 'intelligent' communicative agents such as Apple's Siri and Amazon’s Alexa. However, effective speech-based human-robot dialogue is less well developed; not only do the fields of robotics and spoken language technology present their own special problems, but their combination raises an additional set of issues. In particular, there appears to be a large gap between the formulaic behaviour that typifies contemporary spoken language dialogue systems and the rich and flexible nature of human-human conversation. As a consequence, we still seem to be some distance away from creating Autonomous Social Agents such as robots that are truly capable of conversing effectively with their human counterparts in real world situations. This talk will address these issues and will argue that we need to go far beyond our current capabilities and understanding if we are to move from developing robots that simply talk and listen to evolving intelligent communicative machines that are capable of entering into effective cooperative relationships with human beings.

Prof. Moore has over 40 years’ experience in Speech Technology R&D and, although an engineer by training, much of his research has been based on insights from human speech perception and production. As Head of the UK Government's Speech Research Unit from 1985 to 1999, he was responsible for the development of the Aurix range of speech technology products and the subsequent formation of 20/20 Speech Ltd. Since 2004 he has been Professor of Spoken Language Processing at the University of Sheffield, and also holds Visiting Chairs at Bristol Robotics Laboratory and University College London Psychology & Language Sciences. He was President of the European/International Speech Communication Association from 1997 to 2001, General Chair for INTERSPEECH-2009 and ISCA Distinguished Lecturer during 2014-15. In 2017 he organised the first international workshop on ‘Vocal Interactivity in-and-between Humans, Animals and Robots (VIHAR)’. Prof. Moore is the current Editor-in-Chief of Computer Speech & Language and in 2016 he was awarded the LREC Antonio Zampoli Prize for "Outstanding Contributions to the Advancement of Language Resources & Language Technology Evaluation within Human Language Technologies” and in 2020 he was given the International Speech Communication Association Special Service Medal for "service in the establishment, leadership and international growth of ISCA".

Researchers in NLP increasingly frame and discuss research results in ways that serve to deemphasize the field's successes, at least in part in an effort to combat the field's widespread hype. Though well-meaning, this often yields misleading or even false claims about the limits of our best technology. This is a problem, and it may be more serious than it looks: It harms our credibility in ways that can make it harder to mitigate present-day harms, from NLP deployments, like those involving discriminatory systems for content moderation or resume screening. It also limits our ability to prepare for the potentially enormous impacts of more distant future advances. This talk urges researchers to be careful about these claims and suggests some research directions and communication strategies that will make it easier to avoid or rebut them.

Sam Bowman has been on the faculty at NYU since 2016, when he completed PhD with Chris Manning and Chris Potts at Stanford. At NYU, he is a member of the Center for Data Science, the Department of Linguistics, and Courant Institute's Department of Computer Science. His research focuses on data, evaluation techniques, and modeling techniques for sentence and paragraph understanding in natural language processing, and on applications of machine learning to scientific questions in linguistic syntax and semantics. He is the senior organizer behind the GLUE and SuperGLUE benchmark competitions and he has received a 2015 EMNLP Best Resource Paper Award, a 2019 *SEM Best Paper Award, a 2017 Google Faculty Research Award, and a 2021 NSF CAREER award.

As speech technologies mature and become ever more pervasive, the opportunities for real impact for people increases. This talk will outline the major challenges faced by researchers in porting mainstream speech technology to the domain of healthcare applications; in particular, the need for personalised systems and the challenge of working in an inherently sparse data domain. Three areas in automatic processing of pathological speech will be covered: i) detection, ii) therapy/treatment and iii) facilitating communication. The talk will give an overview of recent state-of-the-art results and specific experiences from current projects at the University of Sheffield (UK)'s Speech and Hearing (SPandH) & Healthcare lab.

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People love to argue. In recent years, Artificial Intelligence has achieved great advances in modelling natural language argumentation. While analysing and creating arguments is a highly complex (and enjoyable!) task at which even humans are not good, let alone perfect, we describe our natural language processing (NLP) research to identify arguments, their stance and aspects, aggregate arguments into topically coherent clusters, and finally, even to generate new arguments, given their desired topic, aspect and stance. The talk will tell you the story how the ArgumenText project has been conceptualized into a set of novel NLP tasks and highlight their main research outcomes. Argument mining has a tremendous number of possible applications, of which the talk discusses a few selected ones.

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The talk will be about some gotcha's in Deep Learning.

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