Department Seminar of Prof. Yoav Goldberg (BIU) - User Centered NLP: Interfaces, Abstractions, and some Missing Pieces 

Prof. Yoav Goldberg (BIU)

Monday, April 4⋅15:00 – 16:00

Location: Physical meeting (011 hall, Wolfson Building of Electrical Engineering-Kitot)

Speaker: Prof. Yoav Goldberg, Computer Science Department, Bar Ilan University

Title: User Centered NLP: Interfaces, Abstractions, and some Missing Pieces 

Abstract: While we can now train effective machine-learned models for many NLP tasks, doing so still requires---beyond obtaining annotated data---also a specialized data-scientist, ML researcher or ML engineer, if not a team of them. Indeed, many NLP efforts involve creating a service, or even a company, around a specific vertical. This leaves NLP capabilities beyond the reach of individuals without ML, NLP or CS training, who may want to extract information from text while doing their work, in their specialized domain. How can we empower scientists and other domain experts to effectively interact with text, on their own?

Bio:Yoav is an associate professor of computer science at Bar Ilan University and the research director of AI2 Israel. His research interests include language understanding technologies with real world applications, combining symbolic and neural representations, uncovering latent information in text, syntactic and semantic processing, and interpretability and foundational understanding of deep learning models for text and sequences. He authored a textbook on deep learning techniques for natural language processing, and was among the IEEE's AI Top 10 to Watch in 2018, and a recipient of the Krill Prize in Science in 2017. He also won several best-paper awards. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Ben Gurion University, and spent time in Google Research as a post-doc.