(Hopefully-Reusable) Life Lessons for PhD Students in NLP

◾ (Hopefully-Reusable) Life Lessons for Ph.D. Students in NLP ◾ Speaker: Vered Shwartz ◾ Talk Description This talk is part of the #wome_in_nlp talk series which invites women who successfully carved their career path in NLP to share their experiences and advice. Everyone is welcome to attend the talk not only women. ◾ Abstract This talk will start with an overview of the problems I've been working on in semantics and commonsense reasoning. Natural language understanding models are trained on a sample of the situations they may encounter. To address unknown situations sensibly, they need commonsense and world knowledge and reasoning abilities. I will briefly introduce some research problems in these areas and the challenges in teaching machines commonsense. In the second and main part of the talk, I will discuss the lessons I learned during my Ph.D., which will hopefully be useful for junior and future Ph.D. students. ◾ Learn more about Vered: Vered Shwartz is a postdoctoral researcher at the Allen Institute for AI (AI2) and the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. Vered's research interests are in NLP, AI, and machine learning, particularly focusing on commonsense knowledge and reasoning, computational semantics, discourse, and pragmatics. Previously, she completed her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Bar-Ilan University. https://vered1986.github.io/ ◾ About #women_in_nlp Website: https://efatmae.github.io/women_in_nlp Twitter: https://twitter.com/fatmaElsafoury Slack channel on dair.ai: https://dairai.slack.com/archives/C01J0GXJMD1 ◾ About dair.ai Website: https://dair.ai/ GitHub: https://github.com/dair-ai Twitter: https://twitter.com/dair_ai Newsletter: https://dair.ai/newsletter/ Slack: https://join.slack.com/t/dairai/shared_invite/zt-pcxkmoip-b4nJkci8L_dynpMwLvlCcQ