Digital Sciences Seminar Series

11am-12pm, Wednesday 13th Sept 2023Collaborative Human-AI Systems for Databases, Diplomacy, and morePresented by Dr. Jonathan KummerfeldVenue: J12 Board Room 124, Computer Science BuildingAbstract: No task in NLP is perfectly solved, even by the latest language models, between 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. I will conclude with a lightning round of highlights from other work going on in my group in the broad space of human-AI systems.