Compositional Reasoning for Natural Language Comprehension and Grounding Leveraging Neuro-Symbolic AI

Parisa Kordjamshidi

Michigan State University

The NLP Reading Group is delighted to receive Parisa Kordjamshidi who will be giving a talk in-person at Mila on “Compositional Reasoning for Natural Language Comprehension and Grounding Leveraging Neuro-Symbolic AI”.

Talk Description

Recent research indicates that large language models lack consistent reliability in tasks requiring complex reasoning. While they may impress us with fluently written articles prompted by user input, they can easily disappoint by displaying shortcomings in basic reasoning skills, such as the functional understanding of ‘left is the opposite of right’, let alone grounding such concepts in diverse real-world situations involving perception and action. To address real-world problems, computational models often need to involve multiple interdependent learners, along with significant levels of composition and reasoning. In this talk, I will present our findings regarding reasoning challenges of LLMs and discuss how symbolic representations can leverage the capacity of neural models for compositional reasoning over complex linguistic structures, grounding language in visual perception, combining multiple modalities of information and handling uncertainty. I will highlight our efforts in Neurosymbolic modeling and introduce DomiKnowS, our developed library that facilitates such modeling. The DomiKnowS framework exploits both symbolic and sub-symbolic representations to solve complex, AI-complete problems and seamlessly integrates symbolic and logical knowledge into deep models through various underlying algorithms.

Speaker Bio

Parisa Kordjamshidi is an Associate Professor of Computer Science & Engineering at Michigan State University. Her research is on Natural Language Processing, Combination of Vision and Language and Neurosymbolic AI. She earned her Ph.D. from KU Leuven in 2013 and conducted a post-doctoral research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign until 2016. Following that, she had a joint appointment as an Assistant Professor at Tulane University and Research Scientist at Florida Institute for Human and Cognition, before joining MSU in 2019. She is a recipient of NSF CAREER, Amazon Faculty Research and Fulbright Specialist awards. She leads multiple projects supported by the Office of Naval Research, investigating the integration of symbolic domain knowledge into deep neural modeling and the combination of vision and language modalities. Kordjamshidi is also a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR) and Action Editor of Transactions of the ACL journal. She has served as a senior area chair and a senior program committee member for major conferences in the ACL, AI and ML communities. She has contributed to the organization of major conferences such as NAACL, EACL, EMNLP, ECML-PKDD, AAAI.

Logistics

Date: September 19th
Time: 2:00PM
Location: H04 or via Google Meet (See email)