10 May 2019 - Raquel Fernandez: Seminar

TITLE:

Visually-grounded dialogue models and what they learn

ABSTRACT:

The past few years have seen an increasing interest in developing computational agents for visually-grounded dialogue, the task of using natural language to communicate about visual content in a multi-agent setup. In this talk, I will present some of my recent and ongoing work in this area. I will start by discussing how visual grounding can be integrated with dialogue system components, using the GuessWhat?! task as a testbed. Most work in the field focuses on reporting numeric results solely based on task success. I will argue that we can gain more insight by (i) analysing the linguistic output of competing systems and (ii) probing the representations they learn. Finally, I will introduce a new dialogue dataset we have developed using a data-collection setup designed to investigate linguistic common ground as it accumulates during visually-grounded interaction.

BIOGRAPHY:

Raquel Fernández is Associate Professor at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC), University of Amsterdam, where she leads the Dialogue Modelling Group. Her work and interests revolve around language use, encompassing topics that range from computational semantics and pragmatics to the dynamics of dialogue interaction, visually-grounded language processing, and child language acquisition. She received her PhD from King's College London and has held research positions at the University of Potsdam and at CSLI, Stanford University. She has been awarded several fellowships by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) and is a recent recipient of an ERC Consolidator Grant.

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