ZürichNLP Visitors: Niket Tandon
2023-06-05 18:00 - 19:00 (Europe/Paris) | OAT ETH Zürich, Andreasstrasse 5 (19th floor), Zurich, 8050
Niket Tandon from AI2 will be visiting Zurich in June and will be giving a talk titled Commonsense injection in large language models. Please RSVP below!
Abstract: Large LMs, while powerful, are not immune to mistakes which are obvious to humans, but they can be prohibitively costly to retrain. Our goal is to effectively correct language model mistakes by injecting knowledge via user interactions with the system but without retraining. Our approach is a memory-augmented architecture, where user feedback is used to make the model generate a better answer or to post hoc correct the errors such that the model does not repeat similar mistakes. We will discuss efficient solutions to designing this memory of knowledge, and leveraging it in the model. This is a step in the direction of never ending learning, and we will present a future roadmap to what open research problems need to be addressed to get to never ending learning language models.
Bio: Niket Tandon is a Senior Research Scientist at the Allen Institute for AI in Seattle. His research interests are in commonsense reasoning and natural language guided reasoning. He works at the Aristo team responsible for creating AI which aced science exams. He obtained his Ph.D. from the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Germany in 2016, where he was supervised by Professor Gerhard Weikum, resulting in the largest automatically extracted commonsense knowledge base at the time, called WebChild. He is also the founder of PQRS research, an organization providing research opportunities to undergraduate students from underrepresented institutes.
Homepage: https://niket.tandon.info/

ZurichNLP Meetup #2
2023-05-10 18:00 - 20:00 (Europe/Helsinki) | OAT ETH Zürich, Andreasstrasse 5 (19th floor), Zurich, 8050
Coming off the success of our first meetup, we welcome all NLP researchers, engineers and enthusiasts to our second event. We have two really exciting guests presenting: Julian Eisenschlos from Google and Alex Warstadt from ETH Zurich.
Please RSVP, spots are limited!
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Modular and Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning for NLP Models
2023-04-26 16:45 (Europe/Paris) | University of Zurich AND (Room 2-02), Andreasstrasse 15, Zurich, 8050, Switzerland
Summary: State-of-the-art language models in NLP perform best when fine-tuned even on small datasets, but due to their increasing size, fine-tuning and downstream usage have become extremely compute-intensive. Being able to efficiently and effectively fine-tune the largest pre-trained models is thus key in order to reap the benefits of the latest advances in NLP. In this tutorial, we provide a comprehensive overview of parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods. We highlight their similarities and differences by presenting them in a unified view. We explore the benefits and usage scenarios of a neglected property of such parameter-efficient models—modularity—such as composition of modules to deal with previously unseen data conditions. We finally highlight how both properties——parameter efficiency and modularity——can be useful in the real-world setting of adapting pre-trained models to under-represented languages and domains with scarce annotated data for several downstream applications.
Speaker: Jonas Pfeiffer is a Research Scientist at Google Research. He is interested in modular representation learning in multi-task, multilingual, and multi-modal contexts, and in low-resource scenarios. He worked on his PhD at the Technical University of Darmstadt, was a visiting researcher at the New York University and a Research Scientist Intern at Meta Research. Jonas has received the IBM PhD Research Fellowship award for 2021/2022. He has given numerous invited talks at academia, industry and ML summer schools, and has co-organized multiple workshops on multilinguality and multimodality.
Also available online: https://uzh.zoom.us/j/62400025916?pwd=[REDACTED]
Additional Information: Guest lecture for the seminar course “Multimodal Multilingual Natural Language Processing”. We will have a small Apero after the talk in the CL coffee lounge. There will be drinks and some snacks.

ZurichNLP Meetup #1
2023-03-21 18:00 - 20:00 (Europe/Paris) | ETH Zurich, Binzmühlestrasse 13, Zurich, 8050, Switzerland
We are doing our first kick-off event on March 21st from 6:00 – 8:00 PM at Binzmühlestrasse 13, 4th Floor, 8050 Zürich
We are very excited to be hosting two speakers, Luca Beurer-Kellner from the SRI lab at ETH Zurich and Basil Mustafa from Google Brain Zurich Looking forward to seeing you there!
