Seminars and Events

ISI Natural Language Seminar

Designing and Evaluating Language Models for Human Interaction

Event Details

REMINDER:

Meeting hosts only admit guests that they know to the Zoom meeting. Hence, you’re highly encouraged to use your USC account to sign into Zoom.

If you’re an outside visitor, please inform us at (nlg-seminar-host(at)isi.edu) beforehand so we’ll be aware of your attendance and let you in.

In-person attendance will be permitted for USC/ISI faculty, staff, students only. Open to the public virtually via the zoom link.

For more information on the NL Seminar series and upcoming talks, please visit:

https://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/ 

Despite the recent advancements in language models (LMs), most LMs are not optimized for, nor are they evaluated on, real-world usage with human interaction. In this talk, I will present my research on designing and evaluating LMs for human-LM interaction. Concretely, I will first describe how we can support human editing needs by enabling any LM to perform text infilling at any position in a document (i.e., “fill in the blanks”). I will then introduce CoAuthor, a platform for capturing human-LM interaction in collaborative writing as rich, replayable, keystroke-level interaction traces. With the platform, I demonstrate how collecting a large interaction dataset and analyzing the traces provide unique insights into LM capabilities regarding language, ideation, and collaboration. Lastly, I will propose a new framework, HALIE (Human-AI Language-based Interaction Evaluation), that defines the components of interactive systems and evaluation metrics for human-LM interaction beyond writing. I will conclude by discussing open challenges and future directions in this field. 

Speaker Bio

Mina Lee is a final-year Ph.D. candidate at Stanford University, advised by Professor Percy Liang. Her research goal is to design and evaluate language models to enhance our productivity and creativity and understand how these models change the way we write. She has built various writing assistants, including an autocomplete system, a contextual thesaurus system, and a creative story writing system, as well as evaluated language models based on their ability to interact with humans and augment human capabilities. She was named one of MIT Technology Review’s Korean Innovators under 35 in 2022, and her work has been published in top-tier venues in natural language processing (e.g., ACL and NAACL), machine learning (e.g., NeurIPS), and human-computer interaction (e.g., CHI). Her recent work on human-AI collaborative writing received an Honorable Mention Award at CHI 2022 and was featured in various media outlets including The Economist.

If speaker approves to be recorded for this NL Seminar talk, it will be posted on our USC/ISI YouTube page within 1-2 business days: https://www.youtube.com/user/USCISI.