| Time: | November 6, 2024, 11:30 a.m. (CET) |
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| Universitätstraße 32.101, Campus Vaihingen of the University of Stuttgart. The talk will take place in person | |
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We are pleased to announce the upcoming ELLIS Distinguished Lecture Series talk by Raquel Fernandez! Looking forward to seeing you all there! No registration necessary.
The talk will be followed by an informal reception during which finger food and drinks will be provided.
Professor Fernandez will also be available for meetings on November 6. If you are interested in scheduling a meeting, please email ellis-office@uni-stuttgart.de
Title: Multimodal and Conversational Grounding in the Era of LLMs
Abstract: Large language models have opened up new scientific opportunities in a variety of fields. Some challenges that had been core roadblocks in natural language processing for decades – such as inferring rich representations for language understanding and generating fluent and complex text – have now mostly been overcome. An exciting consequence of this is that we can now dive into more nuanced problems within the language sciences. Two frontiers in the computational modelling of language use – which we should arguably be better equipped to tackle now – concern perceptual grounding and social interaction. In this talk, I will review some of the current challenges of language models regarding these frontiers, present some recent work on multimodal and conversational grounding, and argue that there is still substantial progress to be made and plenty of interesting open questions ahead of us
Bio: Raquel Fernández is Full Professor of Computational Linguistics at the Institute for Logic, Language & Computation (ILLC), University of Amsterdam, where she leads the Dialogue Modelling Group. Her interests revolve around language use in context, including computational semantics and pragmatics, dialogue interaction, visually-grounded language processing, and language learning, among others. Raquel studied language and cognitive science in Barcelona, her home city, and received her PhD in natural language processing from King's College London. Before moving to Amsterdam, she held research positions at the Linguistics Department of the University of Potsdam and at the Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI), Stanford University. Over the course of her career, she has been awarded several prestigious personal fellowships by the Dutch Research Council and is the recipient of a European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant. Raquel is an ELLIS Fellow and a member of the ELLIS NLP program.