Language evolution seminar

Speaker: Douwe Kiela (Facebook AI Research)

Title: Grounded Multi-Agent Language Games

Abstract: I will talk about recent work done at FAIR on novel directions for natural language processing research. While a lot of progress has recently been made in natural language understanding, e.g. by using (contextualized) word and sentence embeddings, big challenges remain. I will discuss fresh perspectives on natural language learning, in the shape of grounded multi-agent language games: While Wittgenstein is often invoked as the godfather of the distributional hypothesis, I argue that he has rather different lessons to teach us. This leads to a new research program for true natural language understanding, centering around active language usage in "grounded multi-agent language games". I will give some examples of research we have done at FAIR that goes in that direction.

Bio: Douwe Kiela is a research scientist at Facebook AI Research (FAIR) in New York. He received his PhD and MPhil from the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory. Before that, Douwe completed an undergraduate degree in Liberal Arts & Sciences at Utrecht University with a double major in Cognitive Artificial Intelligence and Philosophy; and then a master's degree in Logic at the University of Amsterdam's Institute for Logic, Language & Computation. Douwe’s work focuses on machine learning and natural language processing, where his research interests lie in grounded language learning and developing better models for language understanding.

Contact

Seminars are organised by the Centre for Language Evolution

Andres Karjus

Centre for Language Evolution