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-event-announcement mailing list.

Schedule

For the Winter 2025 semester, the reading group will meet every other week on Fridays at 1PM (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
January 31st @ 3PM	Group Discussion	NLP Roundtable: Where have we been and where are we going?	click here
February 21st @ 1PM	Group Discussion	NLP Roundtable: The Reviewing Process	click here
February 28th @ 1PM	Amal Zouaq	LLMs/VLMs and Nonparametric Memory	click here
March 14th @ 1PM	Muhammad Umair	AI Conversationalists know what to say but not when to speak	click here
March 21st @ 1PM	Group Discussion Led by Sara Vera Marjanovic	NLP Roundtable: DeepSeek	click here
April 4th @ 1PM	Yifan Wang	RSA-Control: A Pragmatics-Grounded Lightweight Controllable Text Generation Framework	click here
April 11th @ 1PM	Jean-Philippe Corbeil	A Modular Approach for Clinical SLMs Driven by Synthetic Data with Pre-Instruction Tuning, Model Merging, and Clinical Alignment	click here
April 25th @ 1PM	Catarina Belem	Perceptions of Linguistic Uncertainty by Language Models and Humans	click here
May 9th @ 1PM	Reto Gubelmann and Stevan Harnad	LLMs and Language Grounding	click here
May 23rd @ 1PM	Angelie Kraft	Epistemic Injustice in the Age of Language Models	click here
May 30th @ 1PM	Ayla Rigouts Terryn	Large language models, large culture models? The role of language in the cultural values exhibited by LLMs	click here

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) and Vaibhav Adlakha (2022 to 2024).

Admin

Schedule

History

Archive