Guest Speaker: Mark Yatskar

Language as a Scaffold for Grounded Intelligence

In this talk, we examine the role of language in enabling grounded intelligence. We consider two applications where language can be used as a scaffold for (a) allowing for the quick acquisition of large-scale common sense knowledge, and (b) enabling broad coverage recognition of events in images. We present technical challenges with using language based representations for grounding, such as sparsity, and social challenges, such as amplified gender bias in models trained on language grounding datasets.   

Bio: Mark Yatskar is a post-doc at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence and recipient of their Young Investigator Award. His primary research is in the intersection of language and vision, natural language generation, and ethical computing. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Washington with Luke Zettlemoyer and Ali Farhadi, received the EMNLP best paper award in 2017, and his work has been featured in Wired and the New York Times.

Host: Alan Ritter