NLP Highlights

NLP Highlights

Author: Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence Language: English Episodes: 100
While NLP Highlights is currently on hiatus, its archive remains a compelling snapshot of conversations from the front lines of computational linguistics. Produced by the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, this science podcast carved out a space for deep, researcher-led discussions about natural language processing. Each episode functions as an informal seminar, where the people actively designing algorithms and pushing the field forward explain their work in their own words. You'll hear about the nuanced challenges behind making machines understand, generate, and reason with human language, from foundational theories to unexpected applications. The dialogue in this podcast often delves into the "why" behind the research, not just the results, offering clarity on complex topics like machine translation, sentiment analysis, or large language models. It’s a chance to listen as experts articulate their thought processes, debates, and moments of insight, with all the candidness that comes from a conversation between peers. The views shared are personal perspectives from the hosts and their guests, independent of their affiliated institutions. For anyone curious about how machines learn to parse meaning, the archived episodes of NLP Highlights provide a thoughtful and accessible entry point.
Episodes
114 - Behavioral Testing of NLP Models, with Marco Tulio Ribeiro [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 43:32
We invited Marco Tulio Ribeiro, a Senior Researcher at Microsoft, to talk about evaluating NLP models using behavioral testing, a framework borrowed from Software Engineering. Marco describes three kinds of black-box tes…
113 - Managing Industry Research Teams, with Fernando Pereira [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 42:22
We invited Fernando Pereira, a VP and Distinguished Engineer at Google, where he leads NLU and ML research, to talk about managing NLP research teams in industry. Topics we discussed include prioritizing research against…
110 - Natural Questions, with Tom Kwiatkowski and Michael Collins [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 43:30
In this episode, Tom Kwiatkowski and Michael Collins talk about Natural Questions, a benchmark for question answering research. We discuss how the dataset was collected to reflect naturally-occurring questions, the crite…
109 - What Does Your Model Know About Language, with Ellie Pavlick [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 46:58
How do we know, in a concrete quantitative sense, what a deep learning model knows about language? In this episode, Ellie Pavlick talks about two broad directions to address this question: structural and behavioral analy…
108 - Data-To-Text Generation, with Verena Rieser and Ondřej Dušek [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 49:30
In this episode we invite Verena Rieser and Ondřej Dušek on to talk to us about the complexities of generating natural language when you have some kind of structured meaning representation as input. We talk about when…
107 - Multi-Modal Transformers, with Hao Tan and Mohit Bansal [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 37:34
In this episode, we invite Hao Tan and Mohit Bansal to talk about multi-modal training of transformers, focusing in particular on their EMNLP 2019 paper that introduced LXMERT, a vision+language transformer. We spend the…
106 - Ethical Considerations In NLP Research, with Emily Bender [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 39:18
In this episode, we talked to Emily Bender about the ethical considerations in developing NLP models and putting them in production. Emily cited specific examples of ethical issues, and talked about the kinds of potentia…
105 - Question Generation, with Sudha Rao [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 42:59
In this episode we invite Sudha Rao to talk about question generation. We talk about different settings where you might want to generate questions: for human testing scenarios (rare), for data augmentation (has been done…