BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//Memento EPFL//
BEGIN:VEVENT
SUMMARY:IC Colloquium: Positive AI with Social Commonsense Models
DTSTART:20210128T160000
DTEND:20210128T170000
DTSTAMP:20260404T015307Z
UID:1357c3330a5aef5359dbf44bf5ff99e0c3a349855c4587aec1173cda
CATEGORIES:Conferences - Seminars
DESCRIPTION:By: Maarten Sap - University of Washington\nIC Faculty candida
 te\n\nAbstract\nTo 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 int
 erpersonal social commonsense\, such as knowing to thank someone for givin
 g you a present\, as well as understanding harmful social biases and stere
 otypes. Failure to account for these social and power dynamics could cause
  models to produce redundant\, rude\, or even harmful outputs.\n\nIn this 
 talk\, I will describe my research on enabling machines to reason about so
 cial 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 machine
 s understand and mitigate social biases in language\, using Social Bias Fr
 ames\, a new structured formalism for distilling biased implications of la
 nguage\, and PowerTransformer\, a new unsupervised model for controllable 
 debiasing of text.\n\nI will conclude with future research directions on m
 aking NLP systems more socially-aware and equitable\, and how to use langu
 age technologies for positive societal impact.\n\nBio\nMaarten Sap is a fi
 nal year PhD student in the University of Washington's natural language pr
 ocessing (NLP) group\, advised by Noah Smith and Yejin Choi. His research 
 focuses on making NLP systems socially intelligent\, and understanding soc
 ial 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 2
 019 and a best paper award at the WeCNLP 2020 summit. Additionally\, he an
 d his team won the inaugural Amazon Alexa Prize\, a social chatbot competi
 tion. In the past\, he has interned at the Allen Institute for AI working 
 on social commonsense reasoning\, and at Microsoft Research working on dee
 p learning models for understanding human cognition.\n\nMore information
LOCATION:https://epfl.zoom.us/j/89524299654?pwd=SytCd1NvMWthL1ZOeHhVQjNNeH
 Budz09
STATUS:CONFIRMED
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR