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The Donald B. Gillies Memorial Lectureship in Computer Science: Kathleen McKeown, "Addressing Large Language Models that Lie: Case Studies in Summarization"

Event Type
Seminar/Symposium
Sponsor
Illinois Computer Science
Location
HYBRID: 2405 Siebel Center for Computer Science and online
Virtual
wifi event
Date
Apr 24, 2024   3:30 pm  
Views
297
Originating Calendar
Computer Science Distinguished Lecture Series

Zoom Link: https://illinois.zoom.us/j/81436507382?pwd=cTZxVDFVMW0wa1VGOXNPMTJJRENzZz09

Reception following program.

Abstract:
The advent of large language models promises a new level of performance in generation of text of all kinds, enabling generation of text that is far more fluent, coherent and relevant than was previously possible. However, they also introduce a major new problem: they hallucinate facts out of thin air. When summarizing an input document, they may incorrectly intermingle facts from the input, they may introduce facts that were not mentioned at all, and worse yet, they may even make up things that are not true in the real world. In this talk, I will discuss our work in characterizing the kinds of errors that can occur and methods that we have developed to help mitigate hallucination in language modeling approaches to text summarization for a variety of genres.

Bio: 
Kathleen R. McKeown is the Henry and Gertrude Rothschild Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University and the Founding Director of the Data Science Institute, serving as Director from 2012 to 2017. In earlier years, she served as Department Chair (1998-2003) and as Vice Dean for Research for the School of Engineering and Applied Science (2010-2012). A leading scholar and researcher in the field of natural language processing, McKeown focuses her research on the use of data for societal problems; her interests include text summarization, question answering, natural language generation, social media analysis and multilingual applications. She has received numerous honors and awards, including 2023 IEEE Innovation in Societal Infrastructure Award, American Philosophical Society Elected member, American Academy of Arts and Science elected member, American Association of Artificial Intelligence Fellow, a Founding Fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics and an Association for Computing Machinery Fellow. Early on she received the National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award, and a National Science Foundation Faculty Award for Women. In 2010, she won both the Columbia Great Teacher Award—an honor bestowed by the students—and the Anita Borg Woman of Vision Award for Innovation.
 

Part of the Illinois Computer Science Speakers Series. Faculty Host: Heng Ji

Meeting ID: 814 3650 7382 
Password: csillinois

If accommodation is required, please email <erink@illinois.edu> or <communications@cs.illinois.edu>. Someone from our staff will contact you to discuss your specific needs.


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