HAI Weekly Seminar with Percy Liang

Watch the Full Recording

Abstract: Natural language promises to be the ultimate interface for interacting with computers, allowing users to effortlessly tap into the wealth of digital information and extract insights from it.  Today, virtual assistants such as Alex, Siri, and Google Assistant have given a glimpse into how this long-standing dream can become a reality, but there is still much work to be done.

In this talk, I will discuss building natural language interfaces based on semantic parsing, which converts natural language into programs that can be executed by a computer.  There are multiple challenges for building semantic parsers: how to acquire data without requiring laborious annotation, how to represent the meaning of sentences, and perhaps most importantly, how to widen the domains and capabilities of a semantic parser.  Finally, I will talk about a new promising paradigm for tackling these challenges based on learning interactively from users.