In this episode, Robin Jia talks about how to build robust NLP systems. We discuss the different senses in which a system can be robust, reasons to care about system robustness, and the challenges involved in evaluating robustness of NLP models. We talk about how to build certifiably robust models through interval bound propagation and discrete encoding functions, as well as how to modify data collection procedures through active learning for more robust model development.

Robin Jia is currently a visiting researcher at Facebook AI Research, and will be an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Southern California starting Fall 2021.

123 - Robust NLP, with Robin Jia

How can we build Visual Question Answering systems for real users? For this episode, we chatted with Danna Gurari, about her work in building datasets and models towards VQA for people who are blind. We talked about the differences between the existing datasets, and Vizwiz, a dataset built by Gurari et al., and the resulting algorithmic changes. We also discussed the unsolved challenges in this field, and the new tasks they result in.

Danna Gurari is an Assistant Professor as well as Founding Director of the Image and Video Computing group in the School of Information at University of Texas at Austin (UT-Austin).

Vizwiz project page: https://vizwiz.org/

The hosts for this episode are Ana Marasović and Pradeep Dasigi.

125 - VQA for Real Users, with Danna Gurari

We invited Lisa Li to talk about her recent work, Prefix-Tuning: Optimizing Continuous Prompts for Generation. Prefix tuning is a lightweight alternative to finetuning, and the idea is to tune only a fixed-length task-specific continuous vector, and to keep the pretrained transformer parameters frozen. We discussed how prefix tuning compares with finetuning and other efficient alternatives on two tasks in various experimental settings, and in what scenarios prefix tuning is preferable.

Lisa is a Phd student at Stanford University. Lisa's webpage: https://xiangli1999.github.io/

The hosts for this episode are Pradeep Dasigi and Ana Marasović.

126 - Optimizing Continuous Prompts for Generation, with Lisa Li

In this episode, we talk to Shunyu Yao about recent insights into how transformers can represent hierarchical structure in language. Bounded-depth hierarchical structure is thought to be a key feature of natural languages, motivating Shunyu and his coauthors to show that transformers can efficiently represent bounded-depth Dyck languages, which can be thought of as a formal model of the structure of natural languages. We went on to discuss some of the intuitive ideas that emerge from the proofs, connections to RNNs, and insights about positional encodings that may have practical implications. More broadly, we also touched on the role of formal languages and other theoretical tools in modern NLP.

Papers discussed in this episode:

- Self-Attention Networks Can Process Bounded Hierarchical Languages (https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.11115)
- Theoretical Limitations of Self-Attention in Neural Sequence Models (https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.06755)
- RNNs can generate bounded hierarchical languages with optimal memory (https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.07515)
- On the Practical Computational Power of Finite Precision RNNs for Language Recognition (https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.04908)

Shunyu Yao's webpage: https://ysymyth.github.io/

The hosts for this episode are William Merrill and Matt Gardner.

129 - Transformers and Hierarchical Structure, with Shunyu Yao

In this episode, we talk with Lisa Beinborn, an assistant professor at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, about how to use human cognitive signals to improve and analyze NLP models. We start by discussing different kinds of cognitive signals—eye-tracking, EEG, MEG, and fMRI—and challenges associated with using them. We then turn to Lisa’s recent work connecting interpretability measures with eye-tracking data, which reflect the relative importance measures of different tokens in human reading comprehension. We discuss empirical results suggesting that eye-tracking signals correlate strongly with gradient-based saliency measures, but not attention, in NLP methods. We conclude with discussion of the implications of these findings, as well as avenues for future work.

Papers discussed in this episode:
Towards best practices for leveraging human language processing signals for natural language processing: https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:219309655
Relative Importance in Sentence Processing: https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:235358922

Lisa Beinborn’s webpage: https://beinborn.eu/

The hosts for this episode are Alexis Ross and Pradeep Dasigi.

130 - Linking human cognitive patterns to NLP Models, with Lisa Beinborn

What can NLP researchers learn from Human Computer Interaction (HCI) research? We chatted with Nanna Inie and Leon Derczynski to find out. We discussed HCI's research processes including methods of inquiry, the data annotation processes used in HCI, and how they are different from NLP, and the cognitive methods used in HCI for qualitative error analyses. We also briefly talked about the opportunities the field of HCI presents for NLP researchers.

This discussion is based on the following paper: https://aclanthology.org/2021.hcinlp-1.16/

Nanna Inie is a postdoctoral researcher and Leon Derczynski is an associate professor in CS at the IT University of Copenhagen.

The hosts for this episode are Ana Marasović and Pradeep Dasigi.

131 - Opportunities and Barriers between HCI and NLP, with Nanna Inie and Leon Derczynski

This episode is the first in our current series on PhD applications.

How should people prepare their applications to PhD programs in NLP? In this episode, we invite Nathan Schneider (Professor of Linguistics and Computer Science at Georgetown University) and Roma Patel (PhD student in Computer Science at Brown University) to share their perspectives on preparing application materials.

We start by talking about what factors should go into the decision to apply for PhD programs and how to gain relevant experience. We then talk about the most important parts of an application, focusing particularly on how to write a strong statement of purpose and choose recommendation letter writers.

Blog posts mentioned in this episode:
- Nathan Schneider’s Advice on Statements of Purpose: https://nschneid.medium.com/inside-ph-d-admissions-what-readers-look-for-in-a-statement-of-purpose-3db4e6081f80
- Student Perspectives on Applying to NLP PhD Programs: https://blog.nelsonliu.me/2019/10/24/student-perspectives-on-applying-to-nlp-phd-programs/

Homepages:
- Nathan Schneider: https://people.cs.georgetown.edu/nschneid/
- Roma Patel: http://cs.brown.edu/people/rpatel59/

The hosts for this episode are Alexis Ross and Nishant Subramani.

133 - PhD Application Series: Preparing Application Materials, with Nathan Schneider and Roma Patel

This episode is the second in our current series on PhD applications.

How do PhD programs in Europe differ from PhD programs in the US, and how should people decide between them? In this episode, we invite Barbara Plank (Professor at ITU, IT University of Copenhagen) and Gonçalo Correia (ELLIS PhD student at University of Lisbon and University of Amsterdam) to share their perspectives on this question.

We start by talking about the main differences between pursuing a PhD in Europe and the US. We then talk about the application requirements for European PhD programs and factors to consider when deciding whether to apply in Europe or the US. We conclude by talking about the ELLIS PhD program, a relatively new program for PhD students that facilitates collaborations across Europe.

ELLIS PhD program: https://ellis.eu/phd-postdoc (Application Deadline: November 15, 2021)

Homepages:
- Barbara Plank: https://bplank.github.io/
- Gonçalo Correia: https://goncalomcorreia.github.io/

The hosts for this episode are Alexis Ross and Zhaofeng Wu.

134 - PhD Application Series: PhDs in Europe versus the US, with Barbara Plank and Gonçalo Correia

This episode is the third in our current series on PhD applications.

We talk about what the PhD application process looks like after applications are submitted. We start with a general overview of the timeline, then talk about how to approach interviews and conversations with faculty, and finish by discussing the different factors to consider in deciding between programs.

The guests for this episode are Rada Mihalcea (Professor at the University of Michigan), Aishwarya Kamath (PhD student at NYU), and Sanjay Subramanian (PhD student at UC Berkeley).

Homepages:
- Aishwarya Kamath: https://ashkamath.github.io/
- Sanjay Subramanian: https://sanjayss34.github.io/
- Rada Mihalcea: https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~mihalcea/

The hosts for this episode are Alexis Ross and Nishant Subramani.

135 - PhD Application Series: After Submitting Applications

In this episode, we talk with Kayo Yin, an incoming PhD at Berkeley, and Malihe Alikhani, an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh, about opportunities for the NLP community to contribute to Sign Language Processing (SLP). We talked about history and misconceptions about sign languages, high-level similarities and differences between spoken and sign languages, distinct linguistic features of signed languages, representations, computational resources, SLP tasks, and suggestions for better design and implementation of SLP models.

136 - Including Signed Languages in NLP, with Kayo Yin and Malihe Alikhani

We invited Urvashi Khandelwal, a research scientist at Google Brain to talk about nearest neighbor language and machine translation models. These models interpolate parametric (conditional) language models with non-parametric distributions over the closest values in some data stores built from relevant data. Not only are these models shown to outperform the usual parametric language models, they also have important implications on memorization and generalization in language models.

Urvashi's webpage: https://urvashik.github.io
Papers discussed:
1) Generalization through memorization: Nearest Neighbor Language Models (https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7be8c119dbe065c52125ee7716601751f3116844)
2)Nearest Neighbor Machine Translation (https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/20d51f8e449b59c7e140f7a7eec9ab4d4d6f80ea)

137 - Nearest Neighbor Language Modeling and Machine Translation, with Urvashi Khandelwal

Compositional generalization refers to the capability of models to generalize to out-of-distribution instances by composing information obtained from the training data. In this episode we chatted with Najoung Kim, on how to explicitly evaluate specific kinds of compositional generalization in neural network models of language. Najoung described COGS, a dataset she built for this, some recent results in the space, and why we should be careful about interpreting the results given the current practice of pretraining models of lots of unlabeled text.

Najoung's webpage: https://najoungkim.github.io/

Papers we discussed:
1. COGS: A Compositional Generalization Challenge Based on Semantic Interpretation (Kim et al., 2020): https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b20ddcbd239f3fa9acc603736ac2e4416302d074
2. Compositional Generalization Requires Compositional Parsers (Weissenhorn et al., 2022): https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/557ebd17b7c7ac4e09bd167d7b8909b8d74d1153
3. Uncontrolled Lexical Exposure Leads to Overestimation of Compositional Generalization in Pretrained Models (Kim et al., 2022): https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8969ea3d254e149aebcfd1ffc8f46910d7cb160e

Note that we referred to the final paper by an earlier name in the discussion.

138 - Compositional Generalization in Neural Networks, with Najoung Kim

How can we generate coherent long stories from language models? Ensuring that the generated story has long range consistency and that it conforms to a high level plan is typically challenging. In this episode, Kevin Yang describes their system that prompts language models to first generate an outline, and iteratively generate the story while following the outline and reranking and editing the outputs for coherence. We also discussed the challenges involved in evaluating long generated texts.

Kevin Yang is a PhD student at UC Berkeley.

Kevin's webpage: https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~yangk/

Papers discussed in this episode:
1. Re3: Generating Longer Stories With Recursive Reprompting and Revision (https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Re3%3A-Generating-Longer-Stories-With-Recursive-and-Yang-Peng/2aab6ca1a8dae3f3db6d248231ac3fa4e222b30a)
2. DOC: Improving Long Story Coherence With Detailed Outline Control (https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/DOC%3A-Improving-Long-Story-Coherence-With-Detailed-Yang-Klein/ef6c768f23f86c4aa59f7e859ca6ffc1392966ca)

139 - Coherent Long Story Generation, with Kevin Yang

In this special episode, we chatted with Chris Callison-Burch about his testimony in the recent U.S. Congress Hearing on the Interoperability of AI and Copyright Law. We started by asking Chris about the purpose and the structure of this hearing. Then we talked about the ongoing discussion on how the copyright law is applicable to content generated by AI systems, the potential risks generative AI poses to artists, and Chris’ take on all of this. We end the episode with a recording of Chris’ opening statement at the hearing.

140 - Generative AI and Copyright, with Chris Callison-Burch

In this special episode of NLP Highlights, we discussed building and open sourcing language models. What is the usual recipe for building large language models? What does it mean to open source them? What new research questions can we answer by open sourcing them? We particularly focused on the ongoing Open Language Model (OLMo) project at AI2, and invited Iz Beltagy and Dirk Groeneveld, the research and engineering leads of the OLMo project to chat.

Blog post announcing OLMo: https://blog.allenai.org/announcing-ai2-olmo-an-open-language-model-made-by-scientists-for-scientists-ab761e4e9b76

Organizations interested in partnership can express their interest here: https://share.hsforms.com/1blFWEWJ2SsysSXFUEJsxuA3ioxm

You can find Iz at twitter.com/i_beltagy and Dirk at twitter.com/mechanicaldirk

141 - Building an open source LM, with Iz Beltagy and Dirk Groeneveld

Our first guest with this new format is Kyle Lo, the most senior lead scientist in the Semantic Scholar team at Allen Institute for AI (AI2), who kindly agreed to share his perspective on #Science of #Science (#scisci) on our podcast. SciSci is concerned with studying how people do science, and includes developing methods and tools to help people consume AND produce science. Kyle has made several critical contributions in this field which enabled a lot of SciSci work over the past 5+ years, ranging from novel NLP methods (eg, SciBERT https://lnkd.in/gTP_tYiF ), to open data collections (eg, S2ORK https://lnkd.in/g4J6tXCG), to toolkits for manipulating scientific documents (eg, PaperMage https://lnkd.in/gwU7k6mJ which JUST received a Best Paper Award 🏆 at EMNLP 2023).

Kyle Lo's homepage: https://kyleclo.github.io/

142 - Science Of Science, with Kyle Lo

This podcast episode features Dr. Mohamed Elhoseiny, a true luminary in the realm of computer vision with over a decade of groundbreaking research. As an Assistant Professor at KAUST, Dr. Elhoseiny's work delves into the intersections of Computer Vision, Language & Vision, and Computational Creativity in Art, Fashion, and AI. Notably, he co-organized the 1st and 2nd Workshops on Closing the Loop between Vision and Language, demonstrating his commitment to advancing interdisciplinary research. With a rich educational background from Stanford University's Graduate School of Business Ignite Program, and Rutgers University as MS/PhD Researcher, coupled with influential stints at Stanford, Baidu Research, Facebook AI Research, Adobe Research, and SRI International, Dr. Elhoseiny brings a wealth of experience to our discussion.

"Imaginative AI" with Mohamed Elhoseiny

Curious about the safety of LLMs? 🤔 Join us for an insightful new episode featuring Suchin Gururangan, Young Investigator at Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Data Science Engineer at Appuri. 🚀 Don't miss out on expert insights into the world of LLMs!

Are LLMs safe?

NIPS 2017 paper.

We dig into the details of the Transformer, from the "attention is all you need" paper.  Ashish and Jakob give us some motivation for replacing RNNs and CNNs with a more parallelizable self-attention mechanism, they describe how this mechanism works, and then we spend the bulk of the episode trying to get their intuitions for _why_ it works.  We discuss the positional encoding mechanism, multi-headed attention, trying to use these ideas to replace encoders in other models, and what the self-attention actually learns.  Turns out that the lower layers learn something like n-grams (similar to CNNs), and the higher layers learn more semantic-y things, like coreference.

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Attention-Is-All-You-Need-Vaswani-Shazeer/0737da0767d77606169cbf4187b83e1ab62f6077

Minor correction: Talking about complexity equations without the paper in front of you can be tricky, and Ashish and Jakob may have gotten some of the details slightly wrong when we were discussing computational complexity.  The high-level point is that self-attention is cheaper than RNNs when the hidden dimension is higher than the sequence length.  See the paper for more details.

36 - Attention Is All You Need, with Ashish Vaswani and Jakob Uszkoreit

It's not uncommon for authors to be frustrated with the quality of peer reviews they receive in (NLP) conferences. In this episode, Noah A. Smith shares his advice on how to write good peer reviews. The structure Noah recommends for writing a peer review starts with a dispassionate summary of what a paper has to offer, followed by the strongest reasons the paper may be accepted, followed by the strongest reasons it may be rejected, and concludes with a list of minor, easy-to-fix problems (e.g., typos) which can be easily addressed in the camera ready. Noah stresses on the importance of thinking about how the reviews we write could demoralize (junior) researchers, and how to be precise and detailed when discussing the weaknesses of a paper to help the authors see the path forward. Other questions we discuss in this episode include: How to read a paper for reviewing purposes? How long it takes to review a paper and how many papers to review? What types of mistakes to be on the lookout for while reviewing? How to review pre-published work?

77. On Writing Quality Peer Reviews, with Noah A. Smith

In this episode, we invite Sebastian Riedel to talk about knowledge base construction (KBC). Why is it an important research area? What are the tradeoffs between using an open vs. closed schema? What are popular methods currently used, and what challenges prevent the adoption of KBC methods? We also briefly discuss the AKBC workshop and its graduation into a conference in 2019.

Sebastian Riedel's homepage: http://www.riedelcastro.org/
AKBC conference: http://www.akbc.ws/2019/

83 - Knowledge Base Construction, with Sebastian Riedel

In this episode, we invite Alistair Johnson to discuss the main challenge in applying NLP/ML to clinical domains: the lack of data. We discuss privacy concerns, de-identification, synthesizing records, legal liabilities and data heterogeneity. We also discuss how the MIMIC dataset evolved over the years, how it is being used, and some of the under-explored ways in which it can be used.

Alistair’s homepage: http://alistairewj.github.io/
MIMIC dataset: https://mimic.physionet.org/

93 - NLP/ML for clinical data, with Alistair Johnson

In this episode, we chat with Luke Zettlemoyer about Question Answering as a format for crowdsourcing annotations of various semantic phenomena in text. We start by talking about QA-SRL and QAMR, two datasets that use QA pairs to annotate predicate-argument relations at the sentence level. Luke describes how this annotation scheme makes it possible to obtain annotations from non-experts, and discusses the tradeoffs involved in choosing this scheme. Then we talk about the challenges involved in using QA-based annotations for more complex phenomena like coreference. Finally, we briefly discuss the value of crowd-labeled datasets given the recent developments in pretraining large language models. Luke is an associate professor at the University of Washington and a Research Scientist at Facebook AI Research.

96 - Question Answering as an Annotation Format, with Luke Zettlemoyer

What function do the different attention heads serve in multi-headed attention models?  In this episode, Lena describes how to use attribution methods to assess the importance and contribution of different heads in several tasks, and describes a gating mechanism to prune the number of effective heads used when combined with an auxiliary loss. Then, we discuss Lena’s work on studying the evolution of representations of individual tokens in transformers model.

Lena’s homepage:
https://lena-voita.github.io/

Blog posts:
https://lena-voita.github.io/posts/acl19_heads.html
https://lena-voita.github.io/posts/emnlp19_evolution.html

Papers:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.09418
https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.01380

98 - Analyzing Information Flow In Transformers, With Elena Voita

What exciting NLP research problems are involved in processing biomedical and clinical data? In this episode, we spoke with Dina Demner-Fushman, who leads NLP and IR research at the Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications, part of the National Library of Medicine. We talked about processing biomedical scientific literature, understanding clinical notes, and answering consumer health questions, and the challenges involved in each of these applications. Dina listed some specific tasks and relevant data sources for NLP researchers interested in such applications, and concluded with some pointers to getting started in this field.

102 - Biomedical NLP research at the National Institute of Health with Dina Demner-Fushman

In this episode we invite Sudha Rao to talk about question generation.  We talk about different settings where you might want to generate questions: for human testing scenarios (rare), for data augmentation (has been done a bunch for SQuAD-like tasks), for detecting missing information / asking clarification questions, for dialog uses, and others.  After giving an overview of the general area, we talk about the specifics of some of Sudha's work, including her ACL 2018 best paper on ranking clarification questions using EVPI.  We conclude with a discussion of evaluating question generation, which is a hard problem, and what the exciting open questions there are in this research area.

Sudha's website: https://raosudha.weebly.com/

105 - Question Generation, with Sudha Rao

In this episode, we talked to Emily Bender about the ethical considerations in developing NLP models and putting them in production. Emily cited specific examples of ethical issues, and talked about the kinds of potential concerns to keep in mind, both when releasing NLP models that will be used by real people, and also while conducting NLP research. We concluded by discussing a set of open-ended questions about designing tasks, collecting data, and publishing results, that Emily has put together towards addressing these concerns.

Emily M. Bender is a Professor in the Department of Linguistics and an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. She’s active on Twitter at @emilymbender.

106 - Ethical Considerations In NLP Research, with Emily Bender

In this episode, we invite Hao Tan and Mohit Bansal to talk about multi-modal training of transformers, focusing in particular on their EMNLP 2019 paper that introduced LXMERT, a vision+language transformer.  We spend the first third of the episode talking about why you might want to have multi-modal representations.  We then move to the specifics of LXMERT, including the model structure, the losses that are used to encourage cross-modal representations, and the data that is used.  Along the way, we mention latent alignments between images and captions, the granularity of captions, and machine translation even comes up a few times.  We conclude with some speculation on the future of multi-modal representations.

Hao's website: http://www.cs.unc.edu/~airsplay/
Mohit's website: http://www.cs.unc.edu/~mbansal/
LXMERT paper: https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/D19-1514/

107 - Multi-Modal Transformers, with Hao Tan and Mohit Bansal

We invited Marco Tulio Ribeiro, a Senior Researcher at Microsoft, to talk about evaluating NLP models using behavioral testing, a framework borrowed from Software Engineering. Marco describes three kinds of black-box tests the check whether NLP models satisfy certain necessary conditions. While breaking the standard IID assumption, this framework presents a way to evaluate whether NLP systems are ready for real-world use. We also discuss what capabilities can be tested using this framework, how one can come up with good tests, and the need for an evolving set of behavioral tests for NLP systems.

Marco’s homepage: https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~marcotcr/

114 - Behavioral Testing of NLP Models, with Marco Tulio Ribeiro

We invited Yonatan Bisk to talk about grounded language understanding. We started off by discussing an overview of the topic, its research goals, and the the challenges involved. In the latter half of the conversation, we talked about ALFRED (Shridhar et al., 2019), a grounded instruction following benchmark that simulates training a robot butler. The current best models built for this benchmark perform very poorly compared to humans. We discussed why that might be, and what could be done to improve their performance.

Yonatan Bisk is currently an assistant professor at Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. The data and the leaderboard for ALFRED can be accessed here: https://askforalfred.com/.

116 - Grounded Language Understanding, with Yonatan Bisk

We interviewed Sameer Singh for this episode, and discussed an overview of recent work in interpreting NLP model predictions, particularly instance-level interpretations. We started out by talking about why it is important to interpret model outputs and why it is a hard problem. We then dove into the details of three kinds of interpretation techniques: attribution based methods, interpretation using influence functions, and generating explanations. Towards the end, we spent some time discussing how explanations of model behavior can be evaluated, and some limitations and potential concerns in evaluation methods.

Sameer Singh is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine.
Some of the techniques discussed in this episode have been implemented in the AllenNLP Interpret framework (details and demo here: https://allennlp.org/interpret).

117 - Interpreting NLP Model Predictions, with Sameer Singh

In this episode, Diyi Yang gives us an overview of using NLP models for social applications, including understanding social relationships, processes, roles, and power.  As NLP systems are getting used more and more in the real world, they additionally have increasing social impacts that must be studied.  We talk about how to get started in this field, what datasets exist and are commonly used, and potential ethical issues.  We additionally cover two of Diyi's recent papers, on neutralizing subjective bias in text, and on modeling persuasiveness in text.

Diyi Yang is an assistant professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech.

119 - Social NLP, with Diyi Yang

**The podcast is currently on hiatus. For more active NLP content, check out the Holistic Intelligence Podcast linked below.**

Welcome to the NLP highlights podcast, where we invite researchers to talk about their work in various areas in natural language processing. All views expressed belong to the hosts/guests, and do not represent their employers.

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