Jonathan K. Kummerfeld

Jonathan K. Kummerfeld is an Assistant Professor in the School of Computer Science at the University of Sydney. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, and was previously a postdoc at the University of Michigan, and a visiting scholar at Harvard. Jonathan’s research focuses on interactions between people and NLP systems, developing more effective algorithms, workflows, and systems for collaboration. He has been on the program committee for over 50 conferences and workshops. He currently serves as the Co-CTO of ACL Rolling Review, and is a standing reviewer for the Computational Linguistics journal and the Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics journal. For more details, see his website.

Speech Title: Collaborative Human-AI Systems for Databases, Diplomacy, and more

Abstract:

No task in NLP is perfectly solved, even by the latest language models, because of intrinsic ambiguity and subtle edge cases. Meanwhile, generative models hallucinate, reproduce bias, and do not justify or explain their outputs. In order to effectively incorporate NLP models into deployed systems, we will need to design them with the interface between people and AI in mind. In this talk, I will describe several projects that aim to improve results by following this human-AI centered approach. First, I will describe how we improved text-to-SQL conversion by introducing human-editable explanations generated with a direct mapping from the natural language explanation back to SQL. Second, I will present work on developing a bot to play Diplomacy, a board game that requires rich communication in natural language between players to form alliances, make plans, and negotiate on strategies.