Minnesota Natural Language Processing Seminar Series: Writing with Language Models

The Minnesota Natural Language Processing (NLP) Seminar is a venue for faculty, postdocs, students, and anyone else interested in theoretical, computational, and human-centric aspects of natural language processing to exchange ideas and foster collaboration.& The talks are every other Friday from 12 p.m. - 1 p.m. during the Fall 2021 semester.

This week's speaker, Mina Lee (Stanford University), will be giving a talk titled "Writing with Language Models."

Abstract

How has the way that we write text messages or emails changed over time with autocomplete or smart reply functionalities? This talk will cover topics centered around building writing assistant systems with language models (LMs) as well as understanding collaborative writing processes between humans and LMs, with the goal of provoking discussions on existing and future forms of interactions. Concretely, I will first focus on building and evaluating productivity tools for writing, including autocomplete and thesaurus systems. Then, I will transition to a more fundamental question of “how can we reason about interaction between humans and LMs?” and introduce our recent work on using a human-LM collaborative writing dataset to understand the capabilities and limitations of LMs.

Biography

Mina Lee is a fifth-year Ph.D. student at Stanford University advised by Percy Liang. Her research interest is to enhance human productivity and creativity in the writing process by understanding human-computer interaction and leveraging natural language processing techniques.