Programme

Note that all time slots listed below are in Eastern Standard Time (UTC-5) and that all sessions take place in the Brickell room. The programme is tentative at the moment!

Morning programme

09:00-09:15 AM — Opening remarks

09:15-10:00 AM — Keynote 1, by Najoung Kim

Najoung Kim Speaker

Title: Semantic generalizations in humans and machines

Abstract: Do machines “understand”? Empirically addressing this question requires an operationalization of what it means to understand. In this talk, I will discuss three tests for machines grounded in formal semantic theories that characterize various aspects of human linguistic understanding, examining the capacities to assign adequate meaning representations to linguistic expressions, to track entities and their states in discourse, and to draw adequate inferences from complex expressions. Critically, these capacities must generalize to unseen expressions. I will discuss the findings from these studies contextualized with respect to human capacities.

Bio: Najoung Kim is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Linguistics and an affiliate faculty in the Department of Computer Science at Boston University. She is also currently a visiting faculty researcher at Google DeepMind. Before joining BU, she was a Faculty Fellow at the Center for Data Science at New York University and received her PhD in Cognitive Science at Johns Hopkins University. She is interested in studying meaning in both human and machine learners, especially ways in which they generalize to novel inputs and ways in which they treat implicit meaning. Her research has been supported by NSF and Google, and has received awards at venues such as ACL and *SEM.

10:00-10:30 AM — Oral presentations

10:30-11:00 AM — Coffee break

11:00-11:45 AM — Keynote 2, by Kyle Lo

Kyle Lo Speaker

Bio: Kyle Lo is a research scientist at the Allen Institute for AI in Seattle, co-leading the pretraining data team for OLMo. His research focuses on open language models, domain adaptation and specialization, evaluation methods, and human-AI interaction. His award-winning work has appeared in major conferences like ACL, EMNLP and CHI, and been featured articles in Nature, Science, TechCrunch and others. In 2020, he co-led a White House OSTP initiative to publicly release the largest collection of COVID-19 research for computing use. Kyle holds a Statistics degree from the University of Washington and enjoys board games, boba tea, D&D, and his cat Belphegor.

11:45-12:30 AM — Spotlight presentations

12:30-1:45 PM — Lunch break

Afternoon programme

1:45-3:00 PM — Poster session

3:00-3:45 PM — Keynote 3, by Sameer Singh

Sameer Singh Speaker

Bio:Dr. Sameer Singh is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) and a Cofounder/CTO of Spiffy AI. He is working primarily on the evaluation, robustness, and interpretability of machine learning algorithms and large models that reason with text and structure for natural language processing. He has been named the Kavli Fellow by the National Academy of Sciences, received the NSF CAREER award, UCI Distinguished Early Career Faculty award, the Hellman Faculty Fellowship, and was selected as a DARPA Riser. His group has received funding from Allen Institute for AI, Amazon, NSF, DARPA, Adobe Research, Hasso Plattner Institute, NEC, Base 11, and FICO. Sameer has published extensively at machine learning and natural language processing venues and received numerous paper awards, including at KDD 2016, ACL 2018, EMNLP 2019, AKBC 2020, ACL 2020, and NAACL 2022.

3:45-4:00 PM — Coffee break

4:00-4:30 PM — Panel

4:30-4:45 PM — Closing remarks and best paper award