Fall 2022 Schedule

Location: Hybrid - Buchanan 126, and the zoom link below

Time: Wednesdays at 10:30am, Mountain Time

Zoom link: https://cuboulder.zoom.us/j/97014876908

Date	Title
24.08.22	Planning, introductions, welcome!
31.08.22	PhD students present! Ongoing projects and opportunities iSAT: Jim, John, Maggie, Ananya, Zoe AIDA: Elizabeth, Rehan, Sijia
07.09.22	PhD students continue to present! 20 minutes per project KAIROS: Susan, Reece AmericasNLP: Katharina, Alexis, Abteen FOLTA: Alexis, Bhargav, Enora, Michael StoryGenerations: Katharina, Maria, Trevor
14.09.22	And more presentations from our fabulous students and colleagues! Assisted interviewing: DJ, Abe THYME: UMR: Martha and Jim
21.09.22	lunch at the Taj
28.09.22	James Pustejovsky Dense Paraphrasing for Textual Enrichment: Question Answering and Inference Abstract: Much of the current computational work on inference in NLP can be associated with one of two techniques: the first focuses on a specific notion of text-based question answering (QA), using large pre-trained language models (LLMs). To examine specific linguistic properties present in the model, « probing tasks » (diagnostic classifiers) have been developed to test capabilities that the LLM demonstrates on interpretable semantic inferencing tasks, such as age and object comparisons, hypernym conjunction, antonym negation, and others. The second is Knowledge Graph-based inference and QA, where triples are mined from Wikipedia, ConceptNet, WikiData, and other non-corpus resources, and then used for answering questions involving multiple components of the KG (multi-hop QA). While quite impressive with benchmarked metrics in QA, both techniques are completely confused by (a) syntactically missing semantic content, and (b) the semantics accompanying the consequences of events and actions in narratives. In this talk, I discuss a model we have developed to enrich the surface form of texts, using type-based semantic operations to « textually expose » the deeper meaning of the corpus that was used to make the original embeddings in the language model. This model, Dense Paraphrasing, is a linguistically-motivated, textual enrichment strategy, that textualizes the compositional operations inherent in a semantic model, such as Generative Lexicon Theory or CCG. This involves broadly three kinds of interpretive processes: (i) recognizing the diverse variability in linguistic forms that can be associated with the same underlying semantic representation (paraphrases); (ii) identifying semantic factors or variables that accompany or are presupposed by the lexical semantics of the words present in the text, through dropped, hidden or shadow arguments; and (iii) interpreting or computing the dynamic consequences of actions and events in the text. After performing these textual enrichment algorithms, we fine-tune the LLM which allows more robust inference and QA task performance. James Pustejovsky, Professor TJX Feldberg Chair in Computer Science Department of Computer Science Chair of CL MS Program Chair of Linguistics Program
05.10.22	Martha, COLING keynote // Daniel poster presentation dry run
12.10.22	COLING / paper review
19.10.22	CLASIC Open House, 11am-1pm This is largely an informational event for students interested in the CLASIC (Computational Linguistics, Analytics, Search, and InformatiCs) Master's program and/or the new LING to CLASIC BAM program. The event will include short talks from graduates of the CLASIC program, and then lunch. Please register if you're interested - until 5pm Monday October 17th.
21.10.22	FRIDAY Carolyn Rose, Carnegie Mellon(ICS/iSAT event) Special time and place: 11am-12:15pm MT, Muenzinger D430 / zoom Title: A Layered Model of Learning during Collaborative Software Development: Programs, Programming, and Programmers Collaborative software development, whether synchronous or asynchronous, is a creative, integrative process in which something new comes into being through the joint engagement, something new that did not fully exist in the mind of any one person prior to the engagement. One can view this engagement from a macro-level perspective, focusing on large scale development efforts of 100 or more developers, organized into sub-teams, producing collections complex software products like Mozilla. Past work in the area of software engineering has explored the symbiosis between the management structure of a software team and the module structure of the resulting software. In this talk, we focus instead on small scale software teams of between 2 and 5 developers, working on smaller-scale efforts of between one hour and 9 months, through more fine grained analysis of collaborative processes and collaborative products. In this more tightly coupled engagement within small groups, we see again a symbiosis between people, processes, and products. This talk bridges between the field of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning and the study of software teams in the field of Software Engineering by investigating the inner-workings of small scale collaborative software development. Building on over a decade of AI-enabled collaborative learning experiences in the classroom and online, in this talk we report our work in progress beginning with classroom studies in large online software courses with substantial teamwork components. In our classroom work, we have adapted an industry standard team practice referred to as Mob Programming into a paradigm called Online Mob Programming (OMP) for the purpose of encouraging teams to reflect on concepts and share work in the midst of their project experience. At the core of this work are process mining technologies that enable real time monitoring and just-in-time support for learning during productive work. Recent work on deep-learning approaches to program understanding bridge between investigations of processes and products.
26.10.22	No meeting -- go to Barbara's talk on Friday, and Nathan's on Monday!
28.10.22	FRIDAY Barbara diEugenio (ICS talk, noon) Special time and place: 12-1:30pm MT, Muenzinger D430 / zoom Title: Knowledge Co-Construction and Initiative in Peer Learning for introductory Computer Science Peer learning has often been shown to be an effective mode of learning for all participants; and knowledge co-construction (KCC), when participants work together to build knowledge, has been shown to correlate with learning in peer interactions. However, KCC is hard to identify and/or support computationally. We conducted an extensive analysis of a corpus of peer-learning interactions in introductory Computer Science: we found a strong relationship between KCC and the linguistic notion of initiative shift, and moderate correlations between initiative shifts and learning. The results of this analysis were incorporated into KSC-PaL, an artificial agent that can collaborate with a human student via natural-language dialog and actions within a graphical workspace. Evaluations of KSC-PaL showed that the agent was able to encourage shifts in initiative in order to promote learning and that students learned using the agent. This work (joint with Cindy Howard, now at Lewis University), was part of two larger projects that studied tutoring dialogues and peer learning interactions for introductory Computer Science, and that resulted in two Intelligent Tutoring Systems, iList and Chiqat-Tutor. Barbara Di Eugenio, PhD, Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois, Chicago
31.10.22	MONDAY Nathan Schneider (Ling Circle Talk, 4pm) Special time and place: 4pm, UMC 247 / zoom (passcode: 795679) Title: The Ins and Outs of Preposition Semantics: Challenges in Comprehensive Corpus Annotation and Automatic Disambiguation In most linguistic meaning representations that are used in NLP, prepositions fly under the radar. I will argue that they should instead be put front and center given their crucial status as linkers of meaning—whether for spatial and temporal relations, for predicate-driven roles, or in special constructions. To that end, we have sought to characterize and disambiguate semantic functions expressed by prepositions and possessives in English (Schneider et al., ACL 2018), and similar markers in other languages (Mandarin Chinese, Korean, Hindi, and German). This approach can be broadened to other constructions and integrated in full-sentence lexical semantic tagging as well as graph-structured meaning representation parsing. Other investigations include crowdsourced annotation, contextualized preposition embeddings, and preposition use in fluent nonnative English. Nathan Schneider, Associate Professor, Depts. of Computer Science and Linguistics, Georgetown University
02.11.22	*** No meeting - UMRs team at Brandeis ***
09.11.22	Practice talks Ananya Ganesh: "CHIA: CHoosing Instances to Annotate for Machine Translation" (accepted to Findings of EMNLP; practicing for the video recording) Abteen Ebrahimi: "Second AmericasNLP Competition on Speech-to-Text Translation for Indigenous Languages of the Americas" (NeurIPS competition; practicing for the in-person presentation of the competition)
16.11.22	Maggie Perkoff, prelim Title: Who said it best? A Thematic Analysis of Open Domain Response Generation Systems Open domain response generation is a rapidly increasing field of natural language processing research. This type of system can be embedded in social chatbots, teaching assistants, and even therapy sessions. The open domain space is defined by the absence of a specific task that the user is trying to achieve by engaging with the conversational agent. A variety of methods have been proposed to improve the capability of these models including knowledge grounded systems, persona embeddings, and transformer models trained on vast datasets. Some of these systems use automated metrics for evaluation alongside human annotators for response quality - but there is no standard assessment for what makes an open domain dialogue system 'better' than any other. This paper seeks to identify broad categories of response generation systems and analyze them based on different themes in open domain conversation: engagement, consistency, correctness, personality, and toxicity.
23.11.22	*** No meeting - fall break ***
30.11.22	Postponed to Spring 2023: HuggingFace demo - Trevor Ward
07.12.22	Coffee and pastries

Past Schedules

• Fall 2022 Schedule
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