Bios of Tutorial 4 Presenters

Sebastian Ruder

Affiliation: DeepMind
Email: sebastian@ruder.io
Website: http://ruder.io
Sebastian is a research scientist at DeepMind where he works on transfer learning and multilingual natural language processing. He has been area chair in machine learning and multilinguality for major NLP conferences including ACL and EMNLP and has published papers on multilingual question answering (Artetxe et al., 2020; Hu et al., 2020). He was the Co-Program Chair for EurNLP 2019 and has co-organized the 4th Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP at ACL 2019. He has taught tutorials on "Transfer learning in natural language processing" and "Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning" at NAACL 2019 and ACL 2019 respectively. He has also co-organized and taught at the NLP Session at the Deep Learning Indaba 2018 and 2019.

Section: Sebastian will teach Multilingual QA during this tutorial (Second 1 1/2 hrs).

Avirup Sil

Affiliation: IBM Research AI
Email: avi@us.ibm.com
Website: http://ibm.biz/avirupsil
Avi is a Research Scientist and the Team Lead for Question Answering in the Multilingual NLP group at IBM Research AI. His team (comprising of research scientists and engineers) works on research on indus try scale NLP and Deep Learning algorithms. His team’s system called ‘GAAMA’ has obtained the top scores in public benchmark datasets (Kwiatkowski et al., 2019) and has published several papers on question answering (Chakravarti et al., 2019; Castelli et al., 2020; Glass et al., 2020). He is also the Chair of the NLP professional community of IBM. Avi is a Senior Program Committe Member and the Area Chair in Question Answering for major NLP conferences e.g. ACL, EMNLP, NAACL and has published several papers on Question Answering. He has taught a tutorial at ACL 2018 on "Entity Discovery and Linking". He has also organized the workshop on the "Relevance of Linguistic Structure in Neural NLP" at ACL 2018. He is also the track coordinator for the Entity Discovery and Linking track at the Text Analysis Conference.

Section: Avi will teach Multi-domain QA during this tutorial (First 1 1/2 hrs).