25th August 2021 - 4pm - Emily Bender: Seminar

Title:  Meaning Making with Artificial Interlocutors and Risks of Language Technology

Abstract:

Humans make sense of language in context, bringing to bear their own understanding of the world including their model of their interlocutor's understanding of the world. In this talk, Professor Bender will explore various potential risks that arise when we, as humans, bring this sense-making capacity to interactions with artificial interlocutors. That is, she will ask what happens in conversations where one party has no (or extremely limited) access to meaning and all of the interpretative work rests with the other, and briefly explore what this entails for the design of language technology.

Bio:

Emily M. Bender is a linguist who works on multilingual grammar engineering, technology for endangered language documentation, computational semantics, and methodologies for supporting consideration of impacts language technology in NLP research, development, and education.  She is the Howard and Frances Nostrand Endowed Professor of Linguistics at the University of Washington. Her work includes the LinGO Grammar Matrix, an open-source starter kit for the development of broad-coverage precision HPSG grammars; data statements for natural language processing, a set of practices for documenting essential information about the characteristics of datasets; and two books which make key linguistic principles accessible to NLP practitioners: Linguistic Fundamentals for Natural Language Processing: 100 Essentials from Morphology and Syntax (2013) and Linguistic Fundamentals for Natural Language Processing II: 100 Essentials from Semantics and Pragmatics (2019, with Alex Lascarides).

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