Afshin Rahimi

Applied Scientist @ Amazon

[Sebastien Bubeck @SebastienBubeck]

This is the coolest "application" of LLMs I have seen in a while: instead of using an LLM to solve a problem set, flip the table and ask the student to TEACH the LLM how to solve the problem set. Really lovely.
Thx to Jordan Hoffmann for sharing this :-). https://t.co/cHQaOGFUVZ

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

Clearly LLMs must one day run in Space

Step 1 we harden llm.c to pass the NASA code standards and style guides, certifying that the code is super safe, safe enough to run in Space.
https://t.co/n9bc9HH79a (see the linked PDF)
LLM training/inference in principle should be super safe - it is just one fixed array of floats, and a single, bounded, well-defined loop of dynamics over it. There is no need for memory to grow or shrink in undefined ways, for recursion, or anything like that.

Step 2 we've already sent messages out to Space, for possible consumption by aliens, e.g. see:

Arecibo message, beamed to space:
https://t.co/UIyOh45jfg
Voyager golden record, attached to probe:
https://t.co/fuwD59oKF6
The Three Body problem (ok bad example)

But instead of sending any fixed data, we could send the weights of an LLM packaged in the llm.c binary, with instructions for the machine code. The LLM would then "wake up" and interact with the aliens on behalf of the human race. Maybe one day we'll ourselves find LLMs of aliens out there, instead of them directly. Maybe the LLMs will find each other. We'd have to make sure the code is really good, otherwise that would be kind of embarrassing.

:) Step 2 is clearly not a serious proposal it's just fun to think about. Step 1 is a serious proposal as, clearly, LLMs must one day run in Space.

[Australasian Language Technology Association @altanlp]

🔥Excited to announce our third keynote talk: "Towards Effective NLP Systems: Cultural Norms, Explainability, and Reasoning Enhancement" by Reza Haffari🎇

More details: https://t.co/ttH3r48XRp
Register for #ALTA2023: https://t.co/jIjLVQIvuK

[Australasian Language Technology Association @altanlp]

🔥#ALTA2023 Extremely pleased to announce our first two keynote talks:
💫Heng Ji: "SmartBook: An AI Prophetess for Disaster Reporting and Forecasting"
💫Terrence Szymanski: "The Commoditisation of NLP in Industry"
More details: https://t.co/ttH3r48XRp
#NLProc #MelbourneNLP

[Afshin Rahimi @ashrayme]

@MatthiasLalisse @tdietterich Add an auxiliary loss on top of next token prediction only for "not" tokens and for places where you could add a "not" but you shouldn't ("not"-tuning).

[AI4PAN - AI for Pandemics group centered at UQ @ai4pan]

Just published - congratulations team. Automatic Identification of 5C Vaccine Behaviour on Social Media (Sampath Kumar et al., WNUT 2022) @ashrayme @AminathShausan
https://t.co/VFcGwG8Slf

[Afshin Rahimi @ashrayme]

Deadline extended to 24th August

[Wei Xu @cocoweixu]

Working on social media data, medical records, student essays, customer reviews, etc.? #nlproc #socialmedia

Consider submitting a paper (4 or 8 pages, due Aug 19) to the COLING 2022 Workshop on Noisy User-generated Text (W-NUT) -- https://t.co/lMZieB3jTG

[Tim Baldwin @eltimster]

aaaand extended a couple of days until Aug 24 ... sorry, a last minute internal decision in light of other relevant #nlproc dates

[Wei Xu @cocoweixu]

Working on social media data, medical records, student essays, customer reviews, etc.? #nlproc #socialmedia

Consider submitting a paper (4 or 8 pages, due Aug 19) to the COLING 2022 Workshop on Noisy User-generated Text (W-NUT) -- https://t.co/lMZieB3jTG

[Afshin Rahimi @ashrayme]

@altanlp @barbara_plank @dirk_hovy Will happen today 10th Dec, check the program: https://t.co/sjdcBt3Yeq

[Australasian Language Technology Association @altanlp]

@barbara_plank (2) Ben Hutchinson: "Putting NLP Ethics Into Context"
and
(3) Dirk Hovy @dirk_hovy : "More than words – Integrating social factors into language modeling"

Register (free) at:
https://t.co/wZE9myLvHO #NLProc #ALTA2021

[Afshin Rahimi @ashrayme]

@sarvk @WLaneguage P.S. It's free and virtual. We welcome participants interested in language technologies from all over the world. We had papers from 6 countries.

[Sarvnaz Karimi @sarvk]

ALTA 2021 is happening next week! If you are interested in NLP, want to hear some amazing talks and keynote speakers, or want to socialise with NLPers down under, registration is open! #NLProc #ALTA2021 @ashrayme @WLaneguage

[Tim Baldwin @eltimster]

Delighted to announce that the 8th iteration of WNUT will take place at #coling2022 in Gyeongju (dare I say at least partially in person?), co-organised with the inimitable @cocoweixu @alan_ritter and @ashrayme: https://t.co/UnrfCrEWHd

[Afshin Rahimi @ashrayme]

https://t.co/k9RaQpcGGL The 19th Annual Workshop of the Australasian Language Technology Association, registration is free for anyone interested. Keynote speakers: @dirk_hovy @barbara_plank @benhutchinson Hands-on Tutorial: MT&Summarisation. All online #ALTA2021 #NLProc

[Afshin Rahimi @ashrayme]

Class-imbalance and fairness are often studied separately, however, they're intertwined. See our paper and presentation at #EMNLP2021 #nlproc https://t.co/NWv7T5XqkP https://t.co/G8KhIPokxq a work with @shivashankar_rs @eltimster @trevorcohn @leafrermann

[Afshin Rahimi @ashrayme]

Submit your NLP/CL/L papers to ALTA2021 (Australasian Language Technology Association), virtual and free for everyone (🙏to sponsors @CSIRO @go1com @DefenceScience @Google) Deadline 1 Oct., https://t.co/PFXPuSCrAB with fantastic @barbara_plank as one of the keynote speakers.

[Jerome Pesenti @an_open_mind]

First time ever a language model has been trained directly from raw audio: no text, no ASR. @facebookai's model has been trained on 8000 hours of audiobooks ( just the audio!). Given a short audio prompt, it can continue and generate new speech with its own voice.

[Diego Molla @diego_ma]

Good luck to all participating in the 2021 ALTA shared task! Deadline: 22 September 2021. This year's topic: Automatic Grading of Evidence - 10 years later https://t.co/N6WbhJeYd5 @altanlp

[Australasian Language Technology Association @altanlp]

Call for Problems for the 2021 ALTA Shared Task: ALTA is seeking problems to use for the 11th ALTA Shared Task. The closing date for submission of proposals is 4 June.
For questions or to submit a proposal, please send an email to: shared.task at https://t.co/hlZZUBy6Tg @diego_ma