Dan Roth (University of Pennsylvania): “Reasoning Myths about Language Models: What is Next?”
Wednesday, April 17, 2024
Seminar from the ASSET Center for AI-Enabled Systems: Safe, Explainable and Trustworthy

Presentation Abstract:
The rapid progress made over the last few years in generating linguistically coherent natural language has blurred, in the mind of many, the difference between natural language generation, understanding, and the ability to reason with respect to the world. Nevertheless, robust support of high-level decisions that depend on natural language understanding, and one that requires dealing with “truthfulness” are still beyond our capabilities, partly since most of these tasks are very sparse, often require grounding, and may depend on new types of supervision signals.

I will discuss some of the challenges underlying reasoning and argue that we should focus on LLMs as orchestrators – coordinating and managing multiple models, applications, and services, as a way to execute complex tasks and processes. I will discuss some of the challenges and present some of our work in this space, focusing on supporting task decomposition and planning.

Speaker Bio:
Dan Roth is the Eduardo D. Glandt Distinguished Professor at the Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania, a VP/Distinguished Scientist at AWS AI Labs, and a Fellow of the AAAS, the ACM, AAAI, and the ACL. In 2017 Roth was awarded the John McCarthy Award, the highest award the AI community gives to mid-career AI researchers. Roth was recognized “for major conceptual and theoretical advances in the modeling of natural language understanding, machine learning, and reasoning.” Roth has published broadly in machine learning, natural language processing, knowledge representation and reasoning, and learning theory. He was the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR), has served as the Program Chair for AAAI, ACL and CoNLL, and as a Conference Chair for a few top conferences. Roth has been involved in several startups; most recently he was a co-founder and chief scientist of NexLP, a startup that leverages the latest advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP), Cognitive Analytics, and Machine Learning in the legal and compliance domains. NexLP was acquired by Reveal in 2020. Prof. Roth received his B.A Summa cum laude in Mathematics from the Technion, Israel, and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Harvard University in 1995.

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