Abstract

Abstract:

Striving towards globally-inclusive models, much effort has been spent on increasing the multilingual capabilities of language technology. However, even large language models still cover major languages only, and knowledge on the effects of their language capabilities in integrated scenarios (e.g., in vision-language models) is rather rare. Additionally, research on multilingual natural language processing has for long ignored other aspects relevant to global inclusion that transcend the surface level-form of languages (e.g., cultural values). In this talk, I will present some of our works showcasing these issues — towards a joint discussion (with you, hopefully) on globally-inclusive language technologies.

Bio: Anne Lauscher is Professor of Data Science at the University of Hamburg, where her research group investigates Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems with a focus on fair, inclusive, and sustainable communication. The professorship is funded by the Excellence Initiative of the German federation and the federal states. Before, she was a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Natural Language Processing group at Bocconi University (Milan, Italy) where she was working on introducing demographic factors into language processing systems with the aim of improving algorithmic performance and system fairness. She obtained her Ph.D., awarded with the highest honors (summa cum laude), from the Data and Web Science group at the University of Mannheim (Germany), where her research focused on the interplay between language representations and computational argumentation. During her studies, she conducted research internships at and became an independent research contractor for Grammarly Inc. (New York City, U.S.) and for the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (Seattle, U.S.). Her research gets regularly published at international top-tier Natural Language Processing (e.g., ACL , EMNLP, etc.) and Artificial Intelligence (e.g., AAAI ) venues and has been recognized with multiple awards. For instance, in 2021, Anne received the Maria Gräfin von Linden-Award in life sciences/ STEM , which honors outstanding female researchers in the German State of Baden-Württemberg.