Course Description (more to come):
This seminar will focus on the development and use of (LT) Language Technologies (i.e., NLP, ASR, MT, etc.) in crisis scenarios (e.g., earthquakes, floods, pandemics, refugee crises, etc.). We have seen an explosive growth in the application of LT to a variety of humanitarian response scenarios—over 400 LT papers have been published in this space in the last 5 years alone—and we will explore the most interesting use cases and technologies applied, for example, machine translation, text simplification and summarization, event recognition and timeline extraction, sentiment and stance detection, mis/dis-information detection, etc. However, there are some gaps in the field that we will look at as well, most notable among them being: application to non-English languages (most work in crisis response is on English social media), using multilingual models and LLMs in crisis response (e.g., for inference and summarization), and working on multimodal or nontextual resources (almost all work in LT for crisis response is on textual sources of data). The seminar will include lectures by the instructor and guest lectures from a variety of experts in LT and/or LT4CPR, and student led lectures reviewing current paper(s) in the field. Each student will be required to present at least one paper (individually or in a group). A final project and/or paper will be required by all students.
Instructor: William Lewis
Prereqs: Ling 570 and 572.