Byron Wallace, an assistant professor at Northeastern University will give a virtual seminar on September 9, 2020. This even is open to the public and will take place via Bluejeans Events (no download required.)
Register: https://primetime.bluejeans.com/a2m/register/ghfqxrfr
Title
Using rationales and influential training examples to (attempt to) explain neural predictions in NLP
Abstract
Modern deep learning models for natural language processing (NLP) achieve state-of-the-art predictive performance but are notoriously opaque. I will discuss recent work looking to address this limitation. I will focus specifically on approaches to: (i) Providing snippets of text (sometimes called "rationales") that support predictions, and; (ii) Identifying examples from the training data that influenced a given model output.
About Byron
Byron Wallace is an assistant professor in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University. He earned his PhD from Tufts University in 2012, after which he taught at Brown University as research faculty. He joined Northeastern from the University of Texas at Austin, where he was an assistant professor in the School of Information from 2014-2016.
Wallace’s research areas include artificial intelligence, data science, machine learning, natural language processing, and information retrieval, with emphasis on applications in health informatics. Byron is a member of the applied machine learning group and the Data Science and Analytics Lab at Northeastern.
Wallace develops machine learning and natural language processing methods that make synthesizing the vast biomedical evidence-base more efficient. He also works on core machine learning and natural language processing methods, with his more of his recent work concerning Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architectures for text. Wallace has recently been developing hybrid, interactive human/machine learning systems that aim to robustly combine human and machine intelligence.
His work has been supported by grants from the Army Research Office, the NIH, and the NSF. He won the Tufts University 2012 Outstanding Graduate Researcher award and his thesis work was recognized as The Runner Up for the 2013 ACM Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (SIG KDD) Dissertation Award. He recently co-authored the winning submission for the Health Care Data Analytics Challenge at the 2015 IEEE International Conference on Healthcare Informatics.
