Reading Group
The McGill NLP reading group hosts speaker presentations and NLP-related discussions in a hybrid fashion at Mila. It is called the McGill NLP reading group for historical reasons, but actively gathers NLP researchers from different Mila-affiliated research institutes across Montreal (McGill University, University of Montreal, etc.).
Admin
The current organizers are Andrei Mircea, Cesare Spinoso, Senyu Li, Tomás Vergara Browne and Ziling Cheng1. They will be taking monthly turns organizing the reading group and its related activities.
For more information about the reading group or for requests to join the mailing list, send an e-mail to the organizers at compling-owner at cs dot mcgill dot ca. For spam filtering reasons, you will need to reply to a confirmation e-mail. Note that this mailing list is used for people outside of Mila. If you already have a Mila email, you will automatically receive reading group announcements through the mila-event-announcement mailing list.
Recordings
Some (but not all) of our previous talks can be found on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@McGillNLP
Schedule
For the Fall 2025 semester, the reading group will meet on Fridays at 2PM on a roughly bi-weekly basis. Meetings will be held in a hybrid fashion. More information including room locations, Zoom link and Google calendar link will be found in the emails we will send announcing speakers/discussion topics both to the Mila-wide email and the CompLing mailing list. Below is a tentative schedule of speakers/topics for the semester. It is actively updated. All times are in ET.
| Date @ Time | Speaker(s) | Topic |
|---|---|---|
| Sept 5 @ 2PM | Mila NLP | Roundtable Discussion |
| Sept 19 @ 2PM | Parisa Kordjamshidi | click here |
| Sept 26th @ 2PM | Gaurav Kamath | click here |
| Oct 3rd @ 2PM | Matthieu Dubois | click here |
| Oct 10th @ 2PM | No talk - COLM 2025 is in Montreal! | |
| Oct 17th @ 2PM | Yuntian Deng | TBA |
| Oct 24th @ 2PM | Juan Wisznia | TBA |
| Oct 31 @ 2PM | Harman Singh | TBA |
| Nov 14 @ 2PM | Joyce Chai | TBA |
| Nov 20 @ 2PM | Behzad Shayegh | Note the date change, this is a Thursday! |
| Nov 28 @ 2PM | Fanny Jourdan | TBA |
| Dec 5 @ 2PM | Ahmed Masry | TBA |
| Dec 12 @ 2PM | En of semester talks | TBA |
History
The McGill NLP reading group was originally started by Prof. Jackie Cheung in the summer of 2015 at McGill and was originally called the Computational Linguistics (CompLing) reading group. In 2019, the CompLing reading group (McGill-specific) merged with the Language Understanding reading group (Mila-wide) to become what it is today. Previous reading group organizers have been: Jackie Cheung (2015), Jad Kabbara (2016), Ali Emami (2017), Yue Dong (2018), Kushal Arora (2019), Aishik Chakraborty (2020), Ian Porada (2021), Arian Hosseini (2019 to 2023), Vaibhav Adlakha (2022 to 2024) and Ori Ernst (2024 to 2025).
Archive
Previous semester schedules of the reading group:
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The organizers are listed based on the alphabetic order of their first name. ↩