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?

In this episode we talk about a couple of recent papers that get at the issue of training variance, and why we should not just take the max from a training distribution when reporting results.  Sadly, our current focus on performance in leaderboards only exacerbates these issues, and (in my opinion) encourages bad science.

Papers:
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Reporting-Score-Distributions-Makes-a-Difference-P-Reimers-Gurevych/0eae432f7edacb262f3434ecdb2af707b5b06481
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Deep-Reinforcement-Learning-that-Matters-Henderson-Islam/90dad036ab47d683080c6be63b00415492b48506

37 - On Statistical Significance, Training Variance, and Why Reporting Score Distributions Matters

EMNLP 2018 paper by Dirk Hovy and Tommaso Fornaciari. https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Improving-Author-Attribute-Prediction-by-Linguistic-Hovy-Fornaciari/71aad8919c864f73108aafd8e926d44e9df51615

In this episode, Dirk Hovy talks about natural language as social phenomenon which can provide insights about those who generate it. For example, this paper uses retrofitted embeddings to improve on two tasks: predicting the gender and age group of a person based on their online reviews. In this approach, authors embeddings are first generated using Doc2Vec, then retrofitted such that authors with similar attributes are closer in the vector space. In order to estimate the retrofitted vectors for authors with unknown attributes, a linear transformation is learned which maps Doc2Vec vectors to the retrofitted vectors. Dirk also used a similar approach to encode geographic information to model regional linguistic variations, in another EMNLP 2018 paper with Christoph Purschke titled “Capturing Regional Variation with Distributed Place Representations and Geographic Retrofitting” [link: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Capturing-Regional-Variation-with-Distributed-Place-Hovy-Purschke/6d9babd835d0cdaaf175f098bb4fd61fd75b1be0].

76 - Increasing In-Class Similarity by Retrofitting Embeddings with Demographics, with Dirk Hovy

Originally used to entice fierce competitions in arcade games, leaderboards recently made their way into NLP research circles. Leaderboards could help mitigate some of the problems in how researchers run experiments and share results (e.g., accidentally overfitting models on a test set), but they also introduce new problems (e.g., breaking author anonymity in peer reviewing). In this episode, Siva Reddy joins us to talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly of using leaderboards in science. We also discuss potential solutions to address some of the outstanding problems with existing leaderboard frameworks.

Software platforms for leaderboards: 
http://codalab.org/ 
https://leaderboard.allenai.org/

80 - Leaderboards and Science, with Siva Reddy

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 Jonathan Berant to talk about executable semantic parsing. We discuss what executable semantic parsing is and how it differs from related tasks such as semantic dependency parsing and abstract meaning representation (AMR) parsing. We talk about the main components of a semantic parser, how the formal language affects design choices in the parser, and end with a discussion of some exciting open problems in this space.

Jonathan Berant's homepage: http://www.cs.tau.ac.il/~joberant/

91 - (Executable) Semantic Parsing, with Jonathan Berant

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

**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.

37 - On Statistical Significance, Training Variance, and Why Reporting Score Distributions Matters

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