NW-NLP 2018: Ben Taskar Invited Talk; Learning and Reasoning about the World using Language

The fifth Pacific Northwest Regional Natural Language Processing Workshop will be held on Friday, April 27, 2018, in Redmond, WA. We accepted abstracts and papers on all aspects of natural language text and speech processing, computational linguistics, and human language technologies. As with past four workshops, the goal of this one-day NW-NLP event is to provide a less-formal setting in the Pacific Northwest to present research ideas, make new acquaintances, and learn about the breadth of exciting work currently being pursued in North-West area. Ben Taskar Invited Talk Title: Learning and Reasoning about the World using Language Invited Speaker: Yejin Choi Understanding a narrative often requires reading between the lines, which in turn, requires rich background knowledge about how the world works. However, learning and reasoning about the obvious, but unspoken facts about the world is nontrivial, as people rarely state the obvious, e.g., "my house is bigger than me." In this talk, I will discuss how we can reverse engineer aspects of commonsense knowledge—ranging from Naive Physics type knowledge to more abstract social commonsense—from how people use language. I will then discuss neural network architectures that can provide structural priors to understand the latent process underlying a procedural text through (neural) simulation of action dynamics. I will conclude the talk by discussing the challenges in current models and formalisms, pointing to avenues for future research. Afternoon Talks Title: Annotation Artifacts in Natural Language Inference Data Speakers: Suchin Gururangan, Swabha Swayamdipta, Omer Levy, Roy Schwartz, Samuel Bowman and Noah Smith Title: Simulating Action Dynamics with Neural Process Networks Speakers: Antoine Bosselut, Omer Levy, Ari Holtzman, Corin Ennis, Dieter Fox and Yejin Choi For more information, schedule, abstracts, etc, please visit the website: https://sites.google.com/view/nwnlp18/home