"Large Language Models - Changing the Landscape of Natural Language Processing Research", Dr. Vijay Mago: Faculty of Science and Environmental Studies Speaker Series Presentation
About the Presentation
In the last ten years, particularly in the last five, research involving pre-trained language models has expanded rapidly. These language models are expected to assist in fabricating text devoid of human prejudices and biases, and in order to meet such high standards, it is essential that key application areas are clearly delineated and accepted by subject matter experts. This will help determine whether the results obtained by these models are credible and may be implemented in practical applications.
In this research presentation, I will introduce the applications and novelties of natural language processing based solutions to better tackle the computational, as well as ethical issues arising from the domains of education, political discourses on social media and news channels, and the emotions expressed in conversation. The key areas of research include semantic similarity of words and sentences; sentiment, stance and emotion analysis of text and recognizing despondency in text. Given that these research projects have direct applications in government agencies, I will further discuss the partnership projects with Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre.
About the Speaker
Vijay Mago is an Associate Professor and Faculty-based Research Chair in Computational Ethics for Natural Language Processing at Lakehead University, ON. He received his PhD in computer science from Panjab University, India in 2010, and has worked as a postdoctoral fellow for two years at the IRMACS Centre, Simon Fraser University, BC. Before joining Lakehead University in 2015, he worked as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the United States. His research interests include big data analytics, health informatics, text analysis, natural language processing and modeling and simulation of complex systems. Within the past six years, Vijay’s research lab has received over $2.5m fundings from NSERC, SSHRC, MITACS, Canada Revenue Agency, Ontario Council on Articulation & Transfer (ONCAT) as well as other industry partners. With his students and collaborators, he has published over 100 papers, many of which have been patented and implemented directly by industrial partners. Vijay serves as an Associate Editor for BMC Medical Informatics and PeerJ Computer Science journals and is an active member of IEEE, ACM and the American Medical Informatics Association.
