Seminars

Spring 2024 Schedule

Spring 2023 Schedule

Date Time & Room Speaker Title, Abstract, Bio Affiliation
February 2 10:00am CT Li Zhang Structured Event Reasoning with Large Language Models University of Pennsylvania
Date Time & Room Speaker Title, Abstract, Bio Affiliation
February 22 3:30pm CT Ajay Divakaran Using Hierarchies of Skills to Assess and Achieve Automatic Multimodal Comprehension SRI
February 27 3:30pm CT Graham Neubig Is My NLP Model Working? The Answer is Harder Than You Think CMU
March 29 3:30pm CT Pradeep Natarajan Multimodal Transformer Models for Joint Text-Visual Processing Amazon
April 21 1:00pm CT Hanna Hajishirzi Toward Robust, Multi-Task Natural Language Processing UW CSE
April 28 11am CT Joel Tetreault A Brief History of Natural Language Processing Dataminr

Fall 2022 Schedule

Date Time & Room Speaker Title, Abstract, Bio Affiliation
September 30 10am CT, 3401 SC Manling Li Multimedia Event Knowledge Extraction: From Object-Centric to Event-Centric Understanding UIUC
October 28 3:30pm CT Avi Sil Question Answering: From the basics to the state-of-the-art with PrimeQA IBM Research
November 9 3:30pm CT Jordan Boyd-Graber If We Want AI to be Interpretable, We Need to Measure Interpretability University of Maryland
November 18 3:30pm CT Snigdha Chaturvedi Modeling People in Story Generation UNC
December 9 11am CT Aman Madaan Language models of code are few-shot reasoners CMU

Spring 2022 Schedule

Date Time & Room Speaker Title, Abstract, Bio Affiliation
March 25 10am CT Feifei Pan End-to-End Questions Answering using Semi-Structured Tabular Data RPI
April 29 10am CT Roy Bar-Haim Project Debater : The AI Grand Challenge, New Results, APIs and Applications IBM

Fall 2021 Schedule

Date Time & Room Speaker Title, Abstract, Bio Affiliation
September 3 4pm CT Shubhra Kanti Karmaker Data Science for “All’’ Auburn University
September 10 10am CT Yixin Cao Self-guided Universal Knowledge Graph Construction Nanyang Technological University
September 17 11am CT Tom Hope Harnessing Scientific Literature for Boosting Discovery and Innovation Allen Institute for AI (AI2)
September 24 10am CT Zhijian Ou Semi-Supervised Task-Oriented Dialog Systems and Natural Language Labeling Tsinghua University
October 1 11am CT Xinya Du Towards More Intelligent Extraction of Information from Documents University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
October 15 2pm CT Pengfei Liu The Fourth Paradigm of Modern Natural Language Processing Techniques Carnegie Mellon University
October 22 11am CT Kezhen Chen Visual Understanding using Analogical Learning Northwestern University
October 29 11am CT Yonatan Bisk Following Instructions and Asking Questions Carnegie Mellon University
December 3 11am CT Xuan Wang Minimum Supervised Text Mining for Literature-based Scientific Discovery University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Summer 2021 Schedule

Date Time & Room Speaker Title, Abstract, Bio Affiliation
June 18 10am CT Mahaveer Jain RNN-T ASR Systems and Enabling Contextualization For RNN-T ASR Systems Facebook
June 25 10am CT Urmish Thakker Software 2.0 and Accelerating NLP Workloads SambaNova

Spring 2021 Schedule

Date Time & Room Speaker Title, Abstract, Bio Affiliation
February 12 10am CT Tuo Zhao On Fine-Tuning of Pretrained Language Models under Limited or Weak Supervision Gatech
February 26 1pm CT Xiang Ren Teaching Machines through Human Explanations USC
March 5 8pm CT Zhiyuan Liu Knowledgeable Learning for Natural Language Processing Tsinghua University
March 12 1pm CT Yizhou Sun Bringing Additional Symbolic Knowledge for Knowledge Graph Reasoning UCLA
March 19 10am CT Preslav I. Nakov Detecting the "Fake News" Before It Was Even Written, Media Literacy, and Flattening the Curve of the COVID-19 Infodemic HBKU
March 26 1pm CT William Wang Learning to Reason with Text and Tables UCSB
April 2 11am CT Laura Dietz How to Automatically Create Relevant Articles UNH
April 9 12pm CT Xifeng Yan From Retrieval Machines to Conversational Agents UCSB
April 16 11am CT Smaranda Muresan Knowledge-enhanced Text Generation: The Curious Case of Figurative Language and Argumentation Columbia
April 30 11am CT Radu Florian The Road Towards Language Agnostic Information Extraction IBM

Fall 2020 Schedule

Date Time & Room Speaker Title, Abstract, Bio Affiliation
September 11, Friday 12pm-1pm CT Yunyao Li Building Domain-Specific Knowledge with Human in the Loop IBM
October 2 12:30pm-1:30pm CT Kai-Wei Chang Towards Accountable Natural Language Processing UCLA
October 16 10am CT Sebastian Ruder Cross-lingual transfer learning DeepMind
October 23 10AM CT Mona Diab Information propagation in an era of Infodemics: The role of language content Facebook & GWU
October 30 10AM CT Huan Sun Towards Interactive, Transparent, and Cost-Effective Question Answering with Applications in the Clinical Domain OSU
December 4 10AM CT Clare Voss Natural Language Interaction with Robots for Remote Exploration: Multi-Phase Approach to "Cold Start" Problem of Dialogue Collection & System Construction ARL
December 18 TBD Adriana Kovashka Title: Reasoning about Complex Media from Weak Multi-modal Supervision University of Pittsburgh

Summer 2020 Schedule

Date Time & Room Speaker Title, Abstract, Bio Affiliation
June 12 12pm CT Jonathan May Theory of Mind and Intent in Procedural Agents: Learning Lessons from Improvisational Theater and Text-based Adventure Games USC
July 24 10am CT Nate Chambers The Challenge of Adversarial Text and How to Extract from it: extracting phone numbers from human trafficking ads US Naval Academy

Fall 2019 Schedule

Date Time & Room Speaker Title, Abstract, Bio Affiliation
October 4 (Friday) 10am-11am, Room 4405, Sibel Center Yejin Choi Commonsense Intelligence: Cracking the Longstanding Challenge in AI UW
October 11 (Friday) 3:30pm-4:30pm, DCL1310 Kyunghyun Cho A Generalized Framework of Sequence Generation NYU
October 18 (Friday) 2pm, Room 2405, Siebel Center Ray Mooney Explainable AI: Making Visual Question Answering Systems more Transparent UT
October 25 (Friday) 10am-11am Avi Sil Transfer Learning for Question Answering at IBM Research AI IBM
November 19 (Tuesday) 4pm-5pm, Room 3403, Siebel Center Michael Regan Extraction of Force-dynamic Image Schemas for Event Structure Representation of Procedural Text University of New Mexico
November 22 (Friday) 10am-11am Lifu Huang Liberal Information Extraction UIUC