CMMRS will include lectures from 6 professors from the University of Maryland, Cornell University, and the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems. Lectures will cover a diverse range of topics. The full list of lectures and topics is yet to be announced; for examples of lecturers and topics from previous years, take a look at the lectures from Previous Editions of CMMRS.
Mariya Toneva, Max Planck Institute for Software Systems
Bridging language in machines with language in the brain
The field of natural language processing (NLP) has undergone a revolution in the last few years, that has been brought about by the availability of large training datasets, improved computational power, and better optimization methods. In the first part of the lecture, we will introduce the recent advances in NLP and discuss some outstanding challenges. In the second part, we will discuss how we can quantify the similarity between NLP machines and the only processing system that we know truly understands language–the human brain. We will finish off with a deep dive into methods that improve the alignment between language in machines and language in the brain.