Home > Events > CLIP Colloquium: Jessy Li (UT Austin)
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CLIP Colloquium: Jessy Li (UT Austin)

Time: 
Wednesday, February 10, 2021 - 11:00 AM to 12:00 PM
Location: 
https://umd.zoom.us/j/93207947099?pwd=c096Z3JrZ1FGSXVEVjFWL29PQUV1dz09

 

Help! Need Advice on Discourse Comprehension

Abstract: With large-scale pre-trained models, natural language processing as a field has made giant leaps in a wide range of tasks. But how are we doing on those that require a deeper understanding of discourse pragmatics, tasks that we humans use language to accomplish on a daily basis? We discuss a case study of advice giving in online forums, and reveal rich discourse strategies in the language of advice. Understanding advice would equip systems with a better grasp of language pragmatics, yet we show that advice identification is challenging for modern NLP models. So then --- how do people comprehend at the discourse level? We tackle this via a novel question generation paradigm, by capturing questions elicited from readers as they read through a text sentence by sentence. Because these questions are generated while the readers are processing the information, they are naturally inquisitive, with a variety of types such as causal, elaboration, and background. Finally, we briefly showcase a new task that requires high level inferences when the target audience of a document changes: providing elaborations and explanations during text simplification.

Bio: Jessy Li is an assistant professor in the Department of Linguistics at UT Austin where she works on in computational linguistics and natural language processing. Her work focuses on discourse organization, text intelligibility, and language pragmatics in social media. She received her Ph.D. in 2017 from the University of Pennsylvania. She received an ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at FSE 2019, an Area Chair Favorite at COLING 2018, and a Best Paper nomination at SIGDIAL 2016.