Seminars

Spring 2023 Schedule

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