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Machine Learning and Friends Lunch (Online)

18 Feb
Thursday, 02/18/2021 11:45am to 1:15pm
Virtual via Zoom
Machine Learning and Friends Lunch
Speaker: Vered Shwartz

Title: Commonsense Knowledge and Reasoning in Natural Language

Abstract: Natural language understanding models are trained on a sample of the real-world situations they may encounter. Commonsense and world knowledge, language, and reasoning skills can help them address unknown situations sensibly. In this talk I will present two lines of work addressing commonsense knowledge and reasoning in natural language. I will first present a method for discovering relevant knowledge which is unstated but may be required for solving a particular problem, e.g., to correctly resolve "Children need to eat more vegetables because they [children / vegetables] are healthy" one needs to know that "vegetables are healthy". Such knowledge is discovered through a process of asking information seeking clarification questions (e.g. "what is the purpose of vegetables?") and answering them ("to provide nutrients"). I will then discuss nonmonotonic reasoning in natural language, a core human reasoning ability that has been studied in classical AI but mostly overlooked in modern NLP. I will talk about several recent papers addressing abductive reasoning (reasoning about plausible explanations), counterfactual reasoning (what if?) and defeasible reasoning (updating beliefs given additional information). Finally, I will discuss open problems in language, knowledge, and reasoning.

Bio: Vered Shwartz is a postdoctoral researcher at the Allen Institute for AI (AI2) and the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. Previously, she completed her PhD in Computer Science from Bar-Ilan University, under the supervision of Prof. Ido Dagan. Her research interests include commonsense reasoning, lexical and compositional semantics.

To obtain the Zoom link for this event, please see the event announcements from MLFL on the college email lists or contact Kalpesh Krishna.

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