NLP Seminar Schedule — Spring 2022
Thursday 11:00 am -- 12:00 noon
Venue: Zoom & Gates 287 (for in-person speakers)

We open most talks to the public (even non-stanford affiliates). Stanford affiliates should join nlp-seminar@lists.stanford.edu for weekly announcements. Non-stanford affiliates can follow us on Twitter for announcements and registration.

Organizers: Ashwin Paranjape,

Date Speaker Title
Mar 31 Anna Rogers Challenges in defining and testing machine verbal reasoning skills (details)
Apr 7 Ryan Cotterell Information-Theoretic Methods in the Study of the Lexicon (details)
Apr 14 Sam Bowman The Dangers of Underclaiming: Reasons for Caution When Reporting How NLP Systems Fail (details)
Apr 21 Dieuwke Hupkes Evaluating generalisation in neural networks for NLP (details)
Apr 28 Ethan Perez Aligning Language Models with Human Preferences (details)
May 5 Eunsol Choi Information-seeking Language Understanding in a Dynamic World(details)
May 19 David Bamman Representation in Literary NLP (details)

NLP Seminar Schedule — Winter 2022

Organizers: Ashwin Paranjape, Drew A. Hudson, Rishi Bommasani

Date Speaker Title
Jan 12 Florian Strub Language Emergence at Scale(details)
Jan 19 Jason Wei Finetuned Language Models are Zero-Shot Learners (details)
Feb 10 Rajarshi Das Nonparametric Contextual Reasoning for Question Answering over Knowledge Bases (details)
Feb 17 Allyson Ettinger "Understanding" and prediction: Controlled examinations of meaning sensitivity in pre-trained models (details)
Feb 24 Alane Suhr Reasoning and Learning in Interactive Natural Language Systems (details)
Mar 3 Krishna Pillutla MAUVE: Measuring the Gap Between Neural Text and Human Text using Divergence Frontiers (details)
Mar 10 Jeff Dalton and Carlos Gemmell Conversation Search and Language Understanding: Current Challenges and Future Directions (details)
Mar 17 Chenguang Zhu How We Achieved Human Parity in CommonsenseQA -- Fusing Knowledge into Language Models

NLP Seminar Schedule — Fall 2021

Organizers: Ashwin Paranjape, Drew A. Hudson, Rishi Bommasani

Date Speaker Title
Sept 30 Sonal Gupta Recent Advances in Fine-Tuning and Question Answering at Facebook Assistant (details)
Oct 7 Marcus Rohrbach Reasoning with Embeddings and Symbols for Incorporating Knowledge and Reading Comprehension in Vision and Language Tasks (details)
Oct 14 Yoav Levine Theoretical insights on pretraining Transformers and their practical applications (details)
Oct 21 Luke Zettlemoyer Large Language Models: Will they keep getting bigger? And, how will we use them if they do?
Oct 28 Tom Hope Harnessing Scientific Literature for Boosting Discovery and Innovation (details)
Nov 4 Sida Wang Bilingual lexicon induction via co-occurrences and bitexts (details)
Nov 11 Stefan Lee Telling Embodied Agents What To Do (And The Agents Sometimes Doing It In Reality) (details)
Nov 18 Sebastian Riedel
Nov 25
Dec 2 Saadia Gabriel Modeling misinformation, implied toxicity and commonsense implications with machine reasoning (details)

NLP Seminar Schedule — Winter 2021

Organizer: Jesse Mu

Date Speaker Title
Jan 14 Ian Tenney BERTology and Beyond (details)
Jan 21 Roger Levy Grammatical generalization in neural language models: insights for theory of human language acquisition and processing (details)
Jan 28 NONE (ACL deadline)
Feb 4 NONE
Feb 11 Angeliki Lazaridou Pitfalls of static language modelling (details)
Feb 18 Su Lin Blodgett Language and Justice: Social Implications of Language Technologies (details)
Feb 25 Ashique KhudaBukhsh Political Polarization and International Conflicts through the Lens of NLP (details)
Mar 4 Eric Wallace What Can We Learn From Vulnerabilities of NLP Models? (details, slides)
Mar 11 Forrest Davis Investigating Competing Training Signals in Language (details)
Mar 18 Elena Voita NMT Analysis: The Trade-Off Between Source and Target, and (a Bit of) the Training Process (details)

NLP Seminar Schedule — Fall 2020

Organizer: Jesse Mu

Date Speaker Title
Oct 8 Jesse Thomason From Human Language to Agent Action (details, slides)
Oct 15 NONE
Oct 22 Yoon Kim Deep Unsupervised Learning of Syntactic Structure (details, slides)
Oct 29 Mikel Artxexe Unsupervised Machine Translation (details, slides)
Nov 5 Douwe Kiela Rethinking Benchmarking in AI (details, slides)
Nov 12 Diyi Yang When Social Context Meets NLP: Learning with Less Data and More Structures (details)
Nov 19 Yonatan Bisk Language Should be Embodied—But what does that mean? (details, slides)
Nov 26 NONE (thanksgiving)
Dec 3 Gokhan Tur Past, Present, Future of Conversational AI (details, slides)
Dec 10 Melanie Subbiah GPT-3: Few-shot Learning with a Giant Language Model (details, slides)

NLP Seminar Schedule — Winter 2020

Organizer: Kevin Clark

Date Speaker Title
Jan 23 Muthu Chandrasekaran A Discourse Centric Framework for Facilitating Instructor Intervention in MOOC Discussion Forums (details)
Jan 30 Yonatan Belinkov Causal Mediation Analysis for Interpreting Neural NLP: The Case of Gender Bias (details)
Feb 6 Maarten Sap Reasoning about Social Dynamics in Language (details)
Feb 13 Wojciech Kryściński Neural Text Summarization: A Critical Perspective and Steps Towards Consistency (details)
20 Feb Daniel Chen Stereotypes in High-Stakes Decisions: Evidence from U.S. Circuit Courts (details)
27 Feb Marco Tulio Ribeiro What is wrong with my model? Detection and analysis of bugs in NLP models (details)
5 Mar Roy Schwartz Green NLP (details)
12 Mar Jon Clark TyDi QA: A Benchmark for Information-Seeking Question Answering in Typologically Diverse Languages (details) REMOTE MEETING

NLP Seminar Schedule — Fall 2019

Organizer: Isabel Papadimitriou

Date Speaker Title
Sept 26 Edgar Altszyler NLP as a means to study individual and social cognition (details)
Oct 10 Bhuwan Dhingra Text as a Virtual Knowledge Base (details, slides)
Oct 17 Alexis Conneau Cross-lingual representation learning (details)
Nov 14 Arthur Szlam Language and Interaction in Minecraft (details)
Nov 21 Michael Auli Efficient Sequence Modeling (details)
Dec 5 Yoav Artzi Robot Control and Collaboration in Situated Instruction Following (details, slides)

NLP Seminar Schedule — Spring 2019

Organizer: Dan Iter

Date Speaker Title
April 4 Swabha Swayamdipta Learning Challenges in Natural Language Processing (details, slides)
April 11 Alon Halevy Subjective Databases (details, slides)
April 18 Paweł Budzianowski Learning multi-domain dialogues (details, slides)
April 25 Ves Stoyanov Cross Lingual Understanding (XLU): Scaling NLP Across Languages (details, slides)
May 2 Sameer Singh Discovering Bugs in NLP Models Using Natural Perturbations (details, slides)
May 9 Xiang Ren From Data to Model Programming: Injecting Structured Priors for Knowledge Extraction (details)
May 16 Yulia Tsvetkov Computational Approaches to Unveiling Biases in Stories and Models (details, slides)
May 23 David Bamman Building an Annotated Dataset of Literary Entities and Events (details, slides)

NLP Seminar Schedule — Winter 2019

Organizer: Dan Iter

Date Speaker Title
Jan 10 Liang Huang STACL: Simultaneous Translation with Integrated Anticipation and Controllable Latency (details, slides)
Jan 17 Jacob Devlin BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding (details, slides)
Jan 24 Anna Goldie Sequence-to-Sequence Modeling and Deep Reinforcement Learning for Systems Optimization (details, slides)
Jan 31 Chenguang Zhu SDNet: Contextualized Attention-based Deep Network for Conversational Question Answering (details, slides)
Feb 7 Yu Su Towards Democratizing Data Science with AI-powered Knowledge Engines (details, slides)
Feb 14 Michael Yeomans Topic Selection in Conversation (details, slides)
Feb 21 Daniel Fried Pragmatic Models for Generating and Following Grounded Instructions (details, slides)
Feb 28 Svitlana Volkova I can’t Believe it’s not Better: Detecting and Quantifying Misinformation and Disinformation (details, slides)
Mar 7 Igor Labutov Teaching Machines like we Teach People (details, slides)
Mar 14 Rachel Rudinger Natural Language Understanding for Events and Participants in Text (details)

NLP Seminar Schedule — Fall 2018

Organizer: Dan Iter

Date Speaker Title
Oct 4 Bryan McCann Natural Language Decathlon: Multitask Learning as Question Answering (details, slides)
Oct 11 Luheng He Semantic Role Labeling with Labeled Span Graph Networks (details, slides)
Oct 18 Shashank Srivastava Learning Classifiers from Natural Language Explanations (details, slides)
Oct 25 Kai-Wei Chang What It Takes to Control Societal Bias in Natural Language Processing (details, slides)
Nov 1 Adams Wei Yu Efficient and Effective Models for Machine Reading Comprehension (details, slides)
Nov 8 Aishwarya Agrawal Visual Question Answering and Beyond (details, slides)
Nov 15 Nanyun Peng Building linguistically informed models for low-resource settings (details, slides)
Nov 29 Sida Wang Building a language interface for data visualization (details)

NLP Seminar Schedule — Winter, Spring & Summer 2018

Organizer: Siva Reddy

Date Speaker Title
Jan 11 Pushpak Bhattacharyya Sarcasm Detection: A Computational Cognitive Approach (details, slides)
Feb 8 Pararth Shah Building a Conversational Agent Overnight with Dialogue Self-Play (details, slides)
Mar 1 Gabor Angeli Conversations, with a reformed academic (details)
Mar 8 Michael Auli Sequence to Sequence Learning: CNNs, Training and Uncertainty (details, slides)
Mar 15 Jonathan Raiman Globally Normalized Reader (details, slides)
Mar 22 Dhanya Sridhar Structured Probabilistic Models for Online Dialogue and Text (details, slides)
Apr 12 Adji Bousso Dieng Deep Sequence Models: Context Representation, Regularization, and Application to Language (details, slides)
May 10 Alan Ritter Large Scale Learning for Information Extraction (details, slides)
May 24 Vered Shwartz Acquiring Lexical Semantic Knowledge (details, slides)
Jun 28 Daniel Khashabi Reasoning-Driven Question Answering (details, slides)
Jul 26 Will Grathwohl Backpropagation Through the Void: Optimizing control variates for black-box gradient estimation (details, slides)
Aug 9 Yulia Tsvetkov Language Generation with Continuous Outputs (details, slides)
Aug 16 Trieu H. Trinh A Simple Method for Commonsense Reasoning (details, slides)
Aug 23 Ekaterina Shutova Grasping the finer point: Metaphor identification in text and brain imaging data (details, slides)


NLP Seminar Schedule — Summer & Fall 2017

Organizer: Siva Reddy

Date Speaker Title
Jul 13 Jason Baldridge Practical and Ethical Considerations in Demographic and Psychographic Analysis (details, slides)
Jul 20 Lukasz Kaiser Tensor2Tensor Transformers: New Deep Models for NLP (details, slides)
ACL 2017 break
Aug 17 Mike Lewis Deal or No Deal? End-to-End Learning for Negotiation Dialogues (details, slides)
Aug 24 Lea Frermann Of Space Piracy and Secret Baby Romances: Deep Multi-View Book Representations and a Scalable Evaluation Framework (details, slides)
Aug 31 Jacob Andreas Structure and Interpretation of Neural Codes (details, slides)
EMNLP 2017 break
Sep 14 Felix Hill Grounded language learning in a simulated 3D world (details)
Sep 21 Semester Break
Sep 28 Zornitsa Kozareva Cancelled
Oct 5 Karthik Narasimhan Language grounding for cross-domain policy transfer and spatial reasoning (details, slides)
Oct 19 Jayant Krishnamurthy Neural Semantic Parsing with Type Constraints (details, slides)
Oct 26 Zhou Yu Situated Intelligent Interactive Systems (details, slides)
Nov 9 Eunsol Choi Scaling Up Reading Comprehension (details, slides)
Nov 30 Nasrin Mostafazadeh Language Comprehension and Language Generation in Eventful Contexts (details, slides)