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 Cesare Spinoso and Ori Ernst. 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-tous mailing list.
Schedule
For the Fall 2024 semester, the reading group will meet on Fridays at 11:30AM (with some exceptions to be expected). 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 | More Information | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| September 13th @ 11:30 AM | Priyank Jaini | Intriguing properties of generative classifiers: generative models align with human visual perception for object recognition | click here | |
| September 20th @ 11:30 AM | Fabian David Schmidt, Ada Tur | Intern Presentations | click here | |
| September 27th @ 11:30 AM | Steven Koniaev, Nathan Zeweniuk | Intern Presentations | click here | |
| October 1st to 3rd | Mila NLP Workshop | Register here | ||
| October 11th @ 11:00 AM | Tu Vu | Efficient Model Development in the Era of Large Language Models | click here | |
| October 18th @ 11:30 AM | Eva Portelance | Reframing linguistic bootstrapping as joint inference using visually-grounded grammar induction models | click here | |
| November 1st @ 11:45 AM | Bang Liu | Applications and Enhancements of LLM Agents Across Diverse Environments | click here | |
| November 8th @ 11:30 AM | Boyuan Zheng | Towards a Generalist Web Agent | click here | |
| November 12th to 16th | EMNLP 2024 | |||
| November 22nd @ 11:30 AM | William Held | Distilling an End-to-End Voice Assistant Without Instruction Training Data | click here | |
| November 29th @ 11:30 AM | Luke Guerdan | Towards Principled Model Evaluation Under Imperfect “Ground Truth” Labels | click here | |
| December 6th 11:00 AM – 1:00 PM | Poster presentations for LLMs course | Various LLM-related topics - To be hosted at the Mila Agora | course syllabus |
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), and Arian Hosseini (2019 to 2023).
Archive
Previous semester schedules of the reading group: