BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//Talks.cam//talks.cam.ac.uk//
X-WR-CALNAME:Talks.cam
BEGIN:VEVENT
SUMMARY:Discourse models with language models - Prof. Jessy Li
DTSTART:20250313T110000Z
DTEND:20250313T120000Z
UID:TALK226261@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Shun Shao
DESCRIPTION:Abstract: How are sentences in a document connected\, and why 
 do they make the document feel “coherent”? Computational models of dis
 course aim to solve this myth by recovering the structural organization of
  texts\, through which writers convey intent and meaning. In the first par
 t of this talk\, I will discuss our efforts on modeling human curiosity th
 rough question generation\, and understanding its connection with discours
 e representations based on the linguistic theory of Questions Under Discus
 sion. We show that LLMs\, with design and training\, resurface curiosity-d
 riven questions and ground their elicitation and answers in text. Next\, I
  will showcase the utility of such generative discourse models via applica
 tions in text simplification\, as well as deriving explainable measures of
  information salience in LLMs using summarization as a behavioral probe.\n
 \nBio:\nJessy Li is an Associate Professor in the Linguistics Department a
 t the University of Texas at Austin. She received her Ph.D. (2017) from th
 e Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Penn
 sylvania. Her research interests are in computational linguistics and NLP\
 , specifically discourse and document-level processing\, natural language 
 generation\, and pragmatics. She is a recipient of an NSF CAREER Award\, A
 CL and EMNLP Outstanding Paper Awards\, an ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper
  Award\, among other honors. Jessy is on the leadership team of the newly 
 established NSF-Simons CosmicAI Institute. She is also the Secretary of th
 e Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Lin
 guistics (NAACL).\n
LOCATION:GR06/07\, English Faculty Building\, 9 West Road\, Sidgwick Site 
 and online https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/97599459216?pwd=QTRsOWZCOXRTREVnbTJ
 BdXVpOXFvdz09
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR