I am posting here the announcement for a research talk that will be held this week at DEI. This is more advanced matter than what we have seen in class, I am posting it just in case someone is interested.
Schedule: April 29th, 2:30pm, Department of Information Engineering, room 318 DEI/G
Title: Bridging Tasks, Languages, and Domains in NLP with Transfer Learning
Speaker: Alan Ramponi
Abstract: Recent developments in natural language processing (NLP), facilitated by the advent of large language models, have shown striking performance improvements across a wide range of tasks. Despite the great performance reported in standard NLP benchmarks, however, language models still struggle to generalize to out-of-distribution scenarios, particularly when encountering new tasks, under-represented languages, and specialized domains for which training data is extremely scarce or absent, limiting their reliable application in real-world settings. In this seminar, I will present research works addressing such challenges through tailored multi-task learning, cross-lingual, and cross-domain language models. After reviewing the core concepts of transfer learning in NLP, I will detail contributions spanning diverse tasks, languages, and domains, and introduce a multi-task learning toolkit that facilitates research in the field. Finally, I will discuss the current challenges and opportunities of modeling the multi-faceted nature of human languages, highlighting the centrality of variation in the data samples NLP works with and the societal impact that our design choices have in the age of socio-technical NLP systems.
Bio: Alan Ramponi is a senior researcher in NLP at Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy. His research focuses on multilingual NLP, generalization and transfer, variability, and societal impact. His work has been published in top-tier international conferences (ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, EACL) and journals (TACL) in the field and received recognitions including an outstanding paper award at EACL 2021 and the "Trentino Prize for Young Researchers" in 2024. He gave several invited talks and seminars, co-organized multiple workshops and shared tasks at the international and national levels, and regularly serves as an area chair in leading NLP venues. Previously, he was a visiting researcher in the NLPNorth group at the IT University of Copenhagen, and got his PhD in computer science in 2021 from the University of Trento. More information: https://alanramponi.github.io