I am teaching a class on Natural Language Understanding in Helsinki, and in connection with the lecture series I gave a seminar for the Language Technology group on evaluating large generative language models including some discussion on what the job of such models is, and what is not or should not be in the job description. We had great fun and some disagreement ensued!
Slides on “How good are generative language models at their job (and what is the job)? are here!”
On October 13th, I gave a talk in Oslo at the conference on Nordic Perspectives on AI. Slides for my talk on Nordic language models are here.
ADRA, the AI, Data, and Robotics Association, organised the first edition of the European AI, Data, and Robotics Forum at INRIA in Versailles on Nov 8-9. I was invited to give a keynote presentation (slides for my talk on “Turning AI into Applications” are here) and to participate in a number of panels and roundtable discussions. I look forward seeing the great plans put forth in these two days turn into concrete projects!
I was honoured to be invited as an external expert to assess the quality of the program in linguistics at Århus university. The program appears to be in good hands, and it was quite interesting to talk to both students and lecturers. I was glad to share some thoughts about the necessity of linguists to be linguists rather than programmers, and that those who would like to work on implementation would be well served with a brief intro to software engineering in addition to coding skills.
On October 12th, I gave a talk on AI in general to kick off a webinar on AI and legal services organised by FICPI. My slides are here.
I gave a talk at META-FORUM, a conference organised by the European Language Equality organisation. My slides on Industrial Language Model Research for a Multilingual Europe are here.
Today, I am in Umeå, to give a talk to the combined DLT and WORDS conferences on “When the map is more exact than the terrain”, partially based on a paper on Semantics in High-DImensional Space by myself and Pentti Kanerva.
I was invited to give a talk <a href=”https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1N635aj5XjA6f2ahxe8hXcAEHLrU937cNsBxKB8QgXEc”>”Should we teach machine learning systems?”</a> at the very vibrant and energetic GAIA conference, the annual do for Gothenburg Artificial Intelligence Alliance. Great fun: a large and very active audience, and an expo hull full of interesting companies exhibiting AI tools!
I have joined Silo AI and their SiloGen project to build and train large language models – both to train base models for European languages and to train specialised models for specific tasks. I will be looking at how to determine and measure quality. I also look forward to using that platform for some forward looking experimentation! Exciting times ahead! And I am looking forward to spending more time in Helsinki the coming years!
This Spring of 2023 I will be teaching a class at the Department of Linguistics in Helsinki under the fairly general and demanding header “Approaches to Natural Language Understanding” with Timothee Mickus. We will mostly talk about approaches to knowledge representation of language and have several labs for students to experiment with.
L0: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1EOPs-q1JvXHo_jbOPVmgWTN_yl_-yCpYOvECsBvrYBw/edit?usp=sharing
L1: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1YO374ZDfBt6GCd4WaDo6DjaWcpRwxdgIk9S-VmaIN1o/edit?usp=sharing
Reading material:
L2: Evaluation and Benchmarks and Shared Tasks
L9: Podcast dataset
L10: Audio features
Jussi Karlgren and Pentti Kanerva: Semantics in High-dimensional Space
Jussi Karlgren 