Inaugural lecture of Prof. Lonneke van der Plas "Breaking Barriers with NLP"

Professor Lonneke van der Plas, who has recently begun her collaboration with USI in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP), will deliver a lecture entitled ‘Breaking Barriers with NLP’. The event will take place on Tuesday, 18 February 2025, at 18:30, in the Auditorium of the West Campus Lugano. The lecture will be held in English.

Lonneke van der Plas has recently taken up the Daccò professorship in Natural Language Processing at the Institute of Argumentation, Linguistics and Semiotics (Faculty of Communication, Culture and Society) and is Adjunct Professor at the Faculty of Informatics.  She works at the intersection of linguistics and informatics in the field of NLP.

Recent advances in NLP, particularly the developments in Large Language Models (LLMs), are the driving force behind popular tools such as ChatGPT. In this talk, Prof. van der Plas will discuss how the field of NLP went from rule-based approaches based on linguistic grammars and dictionaries to where we are now in the field of NLP and explain the overall workings of LLMs.

She will then discuss some current challenges and explain how she addresses these with her research. For example, diversity both in input and output of NLP models allows for the inclusion of less dominant languages and cultures, and by incorporating aspects of human cognitive processes models can learn and perform tasks in a more flexible, human-like manner. She will finally argue that interdisciplinary work is key to further advancing methods and models that already impact many different aspects of society.

At the end of the event, light refreshments will be offered.

The event is open to the USI community and the general public by registering at the following link by February, 11th.