CS Distinguished Speaker: Rada Mihalcea (University of Michigan)
Democratizing Language: Towards Language Models for Everyone
Abstract: Language models have largely been a “success story” in AI. They have enabled progress in numerous language processing applications, and opened the door to the integration of AI in other domains such as social sciences and humanities. Yet, these models mainly follow the strategy of one-size-fits-all, which does not account for individual or group differences. In this talk, I will explore the interplay between language and people, highlighting the need for cross-cultural language models that can capture the diverse ways in which different groups use language. I will show how we can develop models to identify and represent words that are used in significantly different ways by speakers from different groups, and also talk about downstream applications that can effectively leverage these people-centric language representations.
Bio: Rada Mihalcea is the Janice M. Jenkins Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan and the Director of the Michigan Artificial Intelligence Lab. Her research interests are in computational linguistics, with a focus on lexical semantics, multilingual natural language processing, and computational social sciences. She serves or has served on the editorial boards of the Journals of Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluations, Natural Language Engineering, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, and Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics. She was a program co-chair for EMNLP 2009 and ACL 2011, and a general chair for NAACL 2015 and *SEM 2019. She is an ACM Fellow, a AAAI Fellow, and served as ACL President (2018-2022 Vice/Past). She is the recipient of a Sarah Goddard Power award (2019) for her contributions to diversity in science, and the recipient of a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers awarded by President Obama (2009).