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).