The fifth Pacific Northwest Regional Natural Language Processing Workshop will be held on Friday April 27 2018, in Redmond, WA. We welcome submissions of extended abstracts in all aspects of natural language text and speech processing, computational linguistics, and human language technologies.
As with past four workshops, the goal of this one-day NW-NLP event is to provide a less-formal setting in the Pacific Northwest to present research ideas, make new acquaintances, and learn about the breadth of exciting work currently being pursued in North-West area.
We encourage submissions of both completed and ongoing work. Accepted submissions will be presented as either an oral presentation or a poster. Students and less established researchers are especially encouraged to submit their work. This workshop will provide a venue for feedback on early-stage research.
Further information about the workshop is provided below. We look forward to your submissions and participation.
Sincerely,
Ryan Georgi, Maryam Siahbani, General Co-chairs
Will Lewis, Local Chair
Understanding a narrative often requires reading between the lines, which in turn, requires rich background knowledge about how the world works. However, learning and reasoning about the obvious, but unspoken facts about the world is nontrivial, as people rarely state the obvious, e.g., "my house is bigger than me." In this talk, I will discuss how we can reverse engineer aspects of commonsense knowledge—ranging from Naive Physics type knowledge to more abstract social commonsense—from how people use language. I will then discuss neural network architectures that can provide structural priors to understand the latent process underlying a procedural text through (neural) simulation of action dynamics. I will conclude the talk by discussing the challenges in current models and formalisms, pointing to avenues for future research.
Yejin Choi is an associate professor of Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington and also a senior research manager at AI2. Her research interests include language grounding with vision, physical and social commonsense, language generation with long-term coherence, conversational AI, and AI for social good. She was among the IEEE’s AI Top 10 to Watch in 2015, a co-recipient of the Marr Prize at ICCV 2013, and a faculty advisor for the Sounding Board team that won the inaugural Alexa Prize Challenge in 2017. Her work on detecting deceptive reviews, predicting the literary success, and interpreting bias and connotation has been featured by numerous media outlets including NBC News for New York, NPR Radio, New York Times, and Bloomberg Business Week. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science at Cornell University.
9:00 Gather (Coffee Break Food Available)
9:30 Introduction Blitz
10:00 Semantic Matching Against a Corpus: New Applications and Methods — (Withheld by author request)
10:20 Synthetic and Natural Noise Both Break Neural Machine Translation — Yonatan Belinkov and Yonatan Bisk.
10:40 Syntactic Scaffolds for Semantic Structures — (Withheld by author request)
11:20 Compositional Language Modeling for Icon-Based Augmentative and Alternative Communication — Shiran Dudy and Steven Bedrick.
11:32 Keep your bearings: Lightly-supervised Information Extraction with Ladder Networks that avoids Semantic Drift — Ajay Nagesh and Mihai Surdeanu.
11:44 Infrequent Discourse Relation Identification Using Data Programming — Xing Zeng, Giuseppe Carenini, Raymond Ng and Hyeju Jang.
11:56 Community Member Retrieval on Social Media using Textual Information — Aaron Jaech, Shobhit Hathi and Mari Ostendorf.
12:08 Semantic similarity of conversational speech between children with and without ASD — Joel Adams and Alexandra Salem.
Yejin Choi: Learning and Reasoning about the World using Language
14:30 Annotation Artifacts in Natural Language Inference Data — Suchin Gururangan, Swabha Swayamdipta, Omer Levy, Roy Schwartz, Samuel Bowman and Noah Smith.
14:50 Simulating Action Dynamics with Neural Process Networks — Antoine Bosselut, Omer Levy, Ari Holtzman, Corin Ennis, Dieter Fox and Yejin Choi.
17:15 Adverbial Clausal Modifiers in the LinGO Grammar Matrix — Kristen Howell and Olga Zamaraeva.
17:35 SimpleQuestions Nearly Solved: A New Upperbound and Baseline Approach — Michael Petrochuk and Luke Zettlemoyer.
17:55 Neural Relation Extraction Model with Selectively Incorporated Concept Embeddings — Yi Luan, Mari Ostendorf and Hannaneh Hajishirzi.
Submissions are now closed.