Events

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Invited speakers and special guests

Title: The two Cultures: from the Arithmetic of Possibilities to Baroque Flutes

Short Bio: Andrea Sgarro este cercetător la Universitatea din Trieste, (Italia) și profesor de Cibernetică și Informatică. Se ocupă de teoria informației, criptografie, fuzzy logic și lingvistică computațională. Este directorul secției Scienza e tecnologia a Circolo della Cultura e delle Arti din Trieste în același timp fiind foarte activ în diseminarea și comunicarea științifică. Cartea sa, Codici segreti, Oscar Mondadori, a oferit pentru prima dată o nouă criptografie unui public de limba italiană. Lingvistica computațională, la care a fost introdus de Solomon Marcus, este în momentul de față principala sa preocupare. Este de asemenea un poliglot pasionat și canta la flaut traversier baroc.

Title: Factuality Challenges in the Era of Large Language Models

Abstract: We will discuss the risks, the challenges, and the opportunities that Large Language Models (LLMs) bring regarding factuality. We will then delve into our recent work on using LLMs to assist fact-checking (e.g., claim normalization, stance detection, question-guided fact-checking, program-guided reasoning, and synthetic data generation for fake news and propaganda identification), on checking and correcting the output of LLMs, on detecting machine-generated text (blackbox and whitebox), and on fighting the ongoing misinformation pollution with LLMs. Finally, we will discuss work on safeguarding LLMs, and the safety mechanisms we incorporated in Jais-chat, the world’s best open Arabic-centric foundation and instruction-tuned LLM.

Short Bio: Preslav Nakov is Professor at Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence. Previously, he was Principal Scientist at the Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU, where he led the Tanbih mega-project, developed in collaboration with MIT, which aims to limit the impact of “fake news”, propaganda and media bias by making users aware of what they are reading, thus promoting media literacy and critical thinking. He received his PhD degree in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley, supported by a Fulbright grant. He is Chair-Elect of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL), Secretary of ACL SIGSLAV, and Secretary of the Truth and Trust Online board of trustees. Formerly, he was PC chair of ACL 2022, and President of ACL SIGLEX. He is also member of the editorial board of several journals including Computational Linguistics, TACL, ACM TOIS, IEEE TASL, IEEE TAC, CS&L, NLE, AI Communications, and Frontiers in AI. He authored a Morgan & Claypool book on Semantic Relations between Nominals, two books on computer algorithms, and 250+ research papers. He received a Best Paper Award at ACM WebSci‘2022, a Best Long Paper Award at CIKM‘2020, a Best Demo Paper Award (Honorable Mention) at ACL‘2020, a Best Task Paper Award (Honorable Mention) at SemEval‘2020, a Best Poster Award at SocInfo‘2019, and the Young Researcher Award at RANLP’2011. He was also the first to receive the Bulgarian President’s John Atanasoff award, named after the inventor of the first automatic electronic digital computer. His research was featured by over 100 news outlets, including Forbes, Boston Globe, Aljazeera, DefenseOne, Business Insider, MIT Technology Review, Science Daily, Popular Science, Fast Company, The Register, WIRED, and Engadget, among others.

Title: Fuzzy logic and Opinion Mining.

Hybride presentation. On site: Titeica Hall, (3rd floor), Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Bucharest, Academiei 14, Bucharest

Online: Google Meet Video call link: https://meet.google.com/xsu-ubfg-osn The event will take place as part of the Solomon Marcus HLT research seminars and NLP master, University of Bucharest (https://nlp.unibuc.ro/master_en.html).

Details: https://nlp.unibuc.ro/events.html

Abstract: Fuzzy logic and Opinion Mining

In the last few years, many publications have appeared in the field of Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining. Many solutions of these tasks of these fields are based on Soft Computing techniques, primarily leaded by Deep Learning at the present moment. But there are others which still resort to the use of the classic techniques such as Fuzzy logic. This talk will present a short summary of some of the main points where researchers are using fuzzy logic to deal with typical classic Sentiment Analysis tasks.

Short bio Jesús Serrano-Guerrero is an associate professor of the university of Castilla-La Mancha (Spain). He obtained his doctorate under the supervision of José Angel Olivas, professor of the same university and awarded doctor honoris causa by the university of La Plata (Argentina). His research topics are focused on the different applications of artificial intelligence on fields such as information retrieval, recommender systems or sentiment analysis among others. Especially, in this last topic, he has several publications and special issues on topic-tier journals with highly-cited researchers such as Enrique Herrera-Viedma, Francisco Chiclana or Erik Cambria. Furthermore, he is usual reviewer of many journal (Information Sciences, Knowledge-based Systems, Information Processing and Management ….) and serves on the editorial boards of the Journals such as Applied Soft Computing or Frontiers on Artificial Intelligence.

Abstract: Prominent questions about the role of sensory vs. linguistic input in the way we acquire and use language have been extensively studied in the psycholinguistic literature. However, the relative effect of various factors in a person’s overall experience on their linguistic system remains unclear. We study this question by making a step forward towards a better understanding of the conceptual perception of colors by color-blind individuals, as reflected in their spontaneous linguistic productions. Using a novel and carefully curated dataset, we show that red-green color-blind speakers use the “red” and “green” color terms in less predictable contexts, and in linguistic environments evoking mental image to a lower extent, when compared to their normal-sighted counterparts. These findings shed some new and interesting light on the role of sensory experience on our linguistic system.

Short bio Ella Rabinovich has completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the department of Computer Science at University of Toronto, supervised by Prof. Suzanne Stevenson. Her research focuses on computational approaches to the study of various aspects of bilingualism. She explores the unique properties of translated texts and productions of advanced non-native speakers, covering a wide range of syntactic and lexical phenomena and applying state-of-the-art (supervised and unsupervised) machine learning and natural language processing techniques. Additional topics she is interested to include computational social science, informational retrieval, and argumentation mining.

In addition to her work at IBM Research Labs, she is holding a faculty position at the Academic College of Tel Aviv-Yaffo (Israel).

Abstract: Word embeddings have largely been a “success story” in our field. They have enabled progress in numerous language processing applications, and have facilitated the application of large-scale language analyses in other domains, such as social sciences and humanities. While less talked about, word embeddings also have many shortcomings — instability, lack of transparency, biases, and more. In this talk, I will review the “ups” and “downs” of word embeddings, discuss tradeoffs, and chart potential future research directions to address some of the downsides of these word representations.

About Rada Mihalcea: is the Janice M. Jenkins Collegiate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan and the Director of the Michigan Artificial Intelligence Lab. Her research interests are in computational linguistics, with a focus on lexical semantics, computational social sciences, and multimodal language processing. She serves or has served on the editorial boards of the Journals of Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluations, Natural Language Engineering, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, and Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics. She was a program co-chair for EMNLP 2009 and ACL 2011, and a general chair for North American ACL 2015 and SEM 2019. She directs multiple diversity and mentorship initiatives, including Girls Encoded and the ACL Year-Round Mentorship program. She currently serves as ACL President. She is the recipient of a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers awarded by President Obama (2009), and was named an ACM Fellow (2019) and an AAAI Fellow (2021). In 2013, she was made an honorary citizen of her hometown of Cluj-Napoca, Romania.

Solomon Marcus seminar in Computational Linguistics 2019-2020

3rd International Conference on Recent Advances in Artificial Intelligence (RAAI) 2019

Access here the call for papers for the third RAAI conference (28-30 June 2019).

Solomon Marcus seminar in Computational Linguistics 2019

Solomon Marcus seminar in Computational Linguistics 2018

2nd International Conference on Recent Advances in Artificial Intelligence (RAAI) 2018

Access here the call for papers for the second RAAI conference (25-26 June 2018).

1st International Conference on Recent Advances in Artificial Intelligence (RAAI)

Access here the call for papers for the first RAAI conference (19-20 June 2017).

Solomon Marcus seminar in Computational Linguistics