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?

NAACL 2018 Outstanding Paper by Elizabeth Clark, Yangfeng Ji, and Noah A. Smith

Both Elizabeth and Yangfeng come on the podcast to tell us about their work.  This paper is an extension of an EMNLP 2017 paper by Yangfeng and co-authors that introduced a language model that included explicit entity representations.  Elizabeth and Yangfeng take that model, improve it a bit, and use it for creative narrative generation, with some interesting applications.  We talk a little bit about the model, but mostly about how the model was used to generate narrative text, how it was evaluated, and what other interesting applications there are of this idea.  The punchline is that this model does a better job at generating coherent stories than other generation techniques, because it can track the entities in the story better.

We've been experimenting with how we record the audio, trying to figure out how to get better audio quality.  Sadly, this episode was a failed experiment, and there is a background hiss that we couldn't get rid of.  Bear with us as we work on this...

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Generation-in-Stories-Using-Entity-Representations-Clark-Ji/56df50601975f6065b8acc0a08c169aaecad97bc

Episode 61

61 - Neural Text Generation in Stories, with Elizabeth Clark and Yangfeng Ji

**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.