Joshua Ziegler on Experience Grounds Language

Link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.10151

Description: The hype machine programmed to make NLP a household term is busy earning its keep. Whether they’re boiling oceans to write people’s Medium posts for them or to produce almost certainly useless React code, giant language models are what all the cool kids are using. As you might expect, we’re going to be talking about why maybe everyone shouldn’t be quite so excited just yet, and we’ll discuss a couple ideas for improving the state of the art.

Speaker Bio: Joshua Ziegler is principal computational linguist at Spokestack, where he dies a little inside each time he reads the phrase “natural language understanding” in a paper about voice assistants. One day he will have his revenge.

NOTE: Due to this being election night, we might end up delaying until 11/10 if scheduling conflicts occur.