We communicate with machines and expect them to perform accordingly. But do the machines truly understand our instructions and how it works?  Natural Language Processing, or NLP, is the key. It has become one of the most important, fast-growing and AI-essential technologies going today. The near future of automation will be driven by NLP in many ways. The speaker will introduce NLP’s history and language models (LMs), and hopefully shed some light on the question of “true understanding” in artificial intelligence.

Date: March 9,  2022 (Wednesday)

Time: 3:30-4:30pm

Speaker: Dr Kong Lingpeng, Department of Computer Science, HKU

About the speaker:

Dr Lingpeng Kong is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Hong Kong (HKU). His research tackles the core problems in natural language processing (NLP) by designing representation learning algorithms that exploit linguistic structures. The work lies at the intersection of deep learning and structured prediction, with an application focus on syntactic parsing, speech recognition, social media analysis and machine translation. Before joining HKU, Dr. Kong was a senior research scientist at Google DeepMind. He obtained my Ph.D. from School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University.