OxNLP events

During Hilary Term 2024, we plan to meet in weeks 1 to 8.

Location: OeRC Teaching Room (Room 277), Oxford e-Research Centre, 7 Keble Road.

Time: Fridays 4pm to 5:30pm

Online: Our meetings take place on zoom. We share the link in the weekly invite for the talks. But if you feel you have missed the link and want to join remotely, email Dragos, Fangru and Ved and they shall be able to provide you with a link.
Accessing the building: The building access is controlled by the university card. If you do not have access, knock on the door at 7 Keble Road and the receptionist should be able to let you in. Alternatively, email Dragos, Fangru or Ved when you are outside and they shall be able to let you in.
External Speakers: We plan to host multiple external speakers during the term. If you would like to suggest names for the speakers, please let the organizing committee know.
Socials: Based on the feedback at the end of Trinity 2023, we plan to organize a few socials where members can discuss their work with each other in a more informal setting. Our first social is planned for week one, Friday 13th. We shall release details on the mail list.
Speaking at the event: We invite student members or early researchers to present at the meetings. Based on the feedback at the end of Trinity 2023, the members felt that the types of talks that had the best impact were those that discussed some important and impactful papers in the field that most people attending could take away from. If you are interested in presenting and want to discuss more, please get in touch with the organizing committee.

See our Talk abstracts page for details of past events.

Week	Date	Topic	Presenter(s)
Week 8	8/3/24	Panel discussion, with a theme of Benchmarking Large Language Models	Panel includes Fazl Barez, Emanuele La Malfa
Week 7	1/3/24	Truth Conditions at Scale, and Beyond	Dr Guy Emerson (University of Cambridge)
Week 6	23/2/24	From Word Models to World Models: Translating from Natural Language to the Probabilistic Language of Thought	Lionel Wong (PhD Student, MIT Brain and Cognitive Sciences)
Week 5	16/2/24	Highlights of NeurIPS 2023	Daniella Ye, Hunar Batra
Week 4	9/2/24	Papers: Graph-enhanced Large Language Models in Asynchronous Plan Reasoning Code Simulation Challenges for Large Language Models	Fangru Lin, Emanuele La Malfa
Week 3	2/2/24	Highlights of EMNLP 2023	Isabelle Lorge, Myeongjun Jang
Week 2	26/1/24	Helpful or Harmful? Evaluating the Safety of Large Language Models	Paul Röttger (Postdoctoral Researcher, MilaNLP Lab at Bocconi University)
Week 1	19/1/24	Who decides how LLMs behave? Re-thinking the role of pluralistic human preferences in steering LLMs	Hannah Kirk (DPhil student, University of Oxford)

Week	Date	Topic	Presenter(s)
Week 8	1/12/23	Understanding Language Models with Formal Language Theory: Recurrent Neural Language Models as Recognizers of (Probabilistic) Formal Languages	Anej Svete (ETH Zurich)
Week 7	24/11/23	Whose LLM? Representation, bias, and applications to misinformation	Scott Hale (OII, University of Oxford)
Week 6	17/11/23	Guidance — constrained sampling with formal grammars for controlling language models	Harsha Nori (Microsoft)
Week 5	10/11/23	Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4	Ved Mathai
Week 4	3/11/23	Interpretable architectures and guided attention for neural language models	Marek Rei (Imperial College, London)
Week 3	27/10/23	When do Prompting and Prefix-Tuning Work? A Theory of Capabilities and Limitations	Aleksandar Petrov (Autonomous Intelligent Machines and Systems CDT, University of Oxford)
Week 2	20/10/23	Mismatches between human language processing and NLP	Janet Pierrehumbert
Week 1	13/10/23	Flash Talks by Members	Group members

Week	Date	Topic	Presenter(s)
Week 8	16/6/23	When Does Aggregating Multiple Skills with Multi-Task Learning Work? A Case Study in Financial NLP	Jingwei Ni. (ETH & UZH)
Week 7	9/6/23	Narrative detection & analysis	Ved Matthai , Felix Drinkall, Anna George & Dragos Gorduza (University of Oxford)
Week 6	2/6/23	Dynamics of meaning and knowledge growth in scientific disciplines	Peter Persoon (Oxford Martin School)
Week 5	26/5/23	Natural Language Processing and Mental Health	Prof Pushpak Bhattacharyya (IIT Bombay)
Week 4	19/5/2023	On bias, trustworthiness, and safety of language models	William Wang (UCSB)
Week 3	12/5/2023	Modular Deep Learning	Edoardo Ponti (University of Edinburgh)
Week 2	5/5/2023	Faking Fake News for Real Fake News Detection: Propaganda-loaded Training Data Generation	Ved Mathai
Week 1	28/4/2023	Discussion	Isabelle Lorge (Discussion leader)

Week	Date	Topic	Presenter(s)
Week 8	6/3/2023	A real-time platform for contextualized conspiracy theory analysis	Calvin Cheng
Week 7	27/2/2023	Is ChatGPT a General-Purpose Natural Language Processing Task Solver?	Fangru Lin
Week 6	20/2/2023	Is Neuro-Symbolic AI Meeting its Promise in Natural Language Processing? A Structured Review	Ved Mathai
Week 5	13/2/2023	Guest speaker talk: NLP for Economics	Elliott Ash (ETH Zurich)
Week 4	6/2/2023	Dissociating language and thought in large language models: a cognitive perspective	Janet Pierrehumbert, Felix Drinkall, Valentin Hofmann
Week 3	30/1/2023	Time Aware Language Models as Temporal Knowledge Bases	Fernando Almansa
Week 2	23/1/2023	CICERO - Human-level play in the game of Diplomacy by combining language models with strategic reasoning	Dragos Gorduza (OMI)
Week 1	16/1/2023	Review of EMNLP papers	Paul Röttger (OII), Hannah Kirk (OII), Valentin Hofmann (OeRC)
Week 0	9/1/2023	Organizational meeting	Janet Pierrehumbert

Week	Date	Topic and Links to Papers	Presenter(s)
MT Week 8	28/11/2022	Evaluating the Generalisability of Neural Rumour Verification Models	Elena Kochkina (Queen Mary University, London)
MT Week 7	21/11/2022	Challenges in NLP for Analyzing Social Media during Emerging Events"	Anjalie Field (Stanford University)
MT Week 6	14/11/2022	On emergent linguistic structures in NLP (1) https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1907367117 (2) https://arxiv.org/pdf/2210.17406.pdf (3) https://arxiv.org/pdf/2104.06644.pdf	Emanuele La Malfa (Oxford CS)
MT Week 5	7/11/2022	Should Semantic Vector Composition Be Explicit? Can it be Linear? https://aclanthology.org/2021.semspace-1.8.pdf	Isabelle Lorge (OeRC)
MT Week 4	31/10/2022	Detecting employment status and detecting depression on Twitter https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.453.pdf	Manuel Tonneau (OII)
MT Week 3	24/10/2022	Quick-fire talks: Past research and future research agenda by group members (5 min each)	Felix Drinkall, Emanuele La Malfa, Schyan Zafar, Max Arhens, Isabelle Lorge, Paul Rottger, Hannah, Lisa Chernenko, Fangru Lin, Calvin Cheng
MT Week 2	17/10/2022	InfoSurgeon: Cross-Media Fine-grained Information Consistency Checking for Fake News Detection https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.133.pdf#page12	Dragos Gorduza (OMI)
MT Week 1	10/10/2022	Organizational Meeting	Janet Pierrehumbert (OeRC)