The DINS Seminar Series is pleased to present:
Towards Inclusive and Equitable Language Technologies
Malihe Alikhani, Assistant Professor, Computer Science, School of Computing and Information, University of Pittsburgh
April 19, 2023
11 am 12 noon
in-person -- Room 538-539 in 130 North Bellefield -- across the street from the IS Building
To attend virtually,
Join Zoom Meeting
https://pitt.zoom.us/j/93909536513
Meeting ID: 939 0953 6513
Abstract: The societal needs of language technology users are rapidly changing alongside the technological landscape, calling for a deeper understanding of the impact of natural language
processing models on user behaviors. As these technologies are increasingly deployed to users, it is ever more important to design culturally responsible and inclusive language technologies that can benefit a diverse population.
Toward this goal, I present two directions: 1) Discourse-aware models for more inclusive and productive social media moderation methods, and 2) Equitable machine learning frameworks for multimodal communication. Finally, I describe my research vision: Building inclusive and collaborative communicative systems by leveraging the cognitive science of language use alongside formal methods of machine learning.
Bio: Malihe Alikhani is an Assistant Professor of computer science in the School of Computing and Information at the University of Pittsburgh. She earned her Ph.D. in computer science with a graduate certificate in cognitive science from Rutgers University in 2020. Her research interests center on using representations of communicative structure, machine learning, and cognitive science to design practical and inclusive NLP systems for social good. Her work has received multiple best paper awards at ACL 2021, UAI2022, INLG2021, and UMAP2022 and has been supported by DARPA, NIH, Google, and Amazon.