DLS - Eduard Hovy, "The Future of LLM NLP"

Abstract:
The emergence of generative LLM processing is revolutionizing NLP. Many researchers have had to completely redefine their goals and work: there is little or no need for research on traditional topics like parsing, QA, MT, and even many remaining open ones like language generation. But our work is far from done. In this talk I identify three primary directions of future LLM-based NLP research (making LLMs usable, useful, and understandable), and describe challenge problems for each. 

Bio: 
Eduard Hovy is the Executive Director of Melbourne Connect (a research and tech transfer centre at the University of Melbourne), a professor at the University of Melbourne’s School of Computing and Information Systems, and a research professor at the Language Technologies Institute in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University.  In 2020–21 he served as Program Manager in DARPA’s Information Innovation Office (I2O), where he managed programs in Natural Language Technology and Data Analytics.  Dr. Hovy completed a Ph.D. in Computer Science (Artificial Intelligence) at Yale University in 1987 and was awarded honorary doctorates from the National Distance Education University (UNED) in Madrid in 2013 and the University of Antwerp in 2015.   He is one of the initial 17 Fellows of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and is also a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).  
Dr. Hovy’s research focuses on computational semantics of language and addresses various areas in Natural Language Processing and Data Analytics, including in-depth machine reading of text, information extraction, automated text summarization, question answering, the semi-automated construction of large lexicons and ontologies, and machine translation.  In early 2024 his Google h-index was 106, with over 60,000 citations.   Dr. Hovy is the author or co-editor of eight books and around 400 technical articles and is a popular invited speaker.  He regularly co-taught Ph.D.-level courses and has served on Advisory and Review Boards for both research institutes and funding organizations in Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Ireland, Singapore, and the USA.