语言与智能高峰论坛

摘要：Natural language processing systems, ranging from Conversational AI to machine translation, have made leaps and bounds in terms of performance with generative models based on language models. Thanks to the advent of large scale pre-trained language models, state-of-the-art NLP systems can generate surprisingly human-like sentences and paragraphs. However, these generation based systems are difficult to control and can lead to inappropriate, biased and sometimes even toxic texts. We also lack the means to measure the inherent knowledge, common sense and biases in the large-scale pre-trained language models. With great power comes great responsibility. We must address the many ethical and technical challenges of generation based NLP systems to control for bias and safety, guard against abuse and promote social harmony. In this talk, I will discuss the various challenges in operationalizing ethical AI in general, and NLP systems in particular, in the context of the ethical AI principles proposed by the governments of China and the European Union. I will give an overview of the state-of-art of technical approaches in ethical NLP and discuss future directions.

简历：Pascale Fung is a Professor at the Department of Electronic & Computer Engineering and Department of Computer Science & Engineering at The Hong Kong University of Science & Technology (HKUST), and a visiting professor at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. She is an elected Fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) for her “significant contributions towards statistical NLP, comparable corpora, and building intelligent systems that can understand and empathize with humans”. She is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) for her “contributions to human-machine interactions”, and an elected Fellow of the International Speech Communication Association for “fundamental contributions to the interdisciplinary area of spoken language human-machine interactions”. She is the Director of HKUST Centre for AI Research (CAiRE), an interdisciplinary research center on top of all four schools at HKUST. She co-founded the Human Language Technology Center (HLTC). She is an affiliated faculty with the Robotics Institute and the Big Data Institute at HKUST. She is the founding chair of the Women Faculty Association at HKUST. She is an expert on the Global Future Council, a think tank for the World Economic Forum. She represents HKUST on Partnership on AI to Benefit People and Society. She is on the Board of Governors of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. She is a member of the IEEE Working Group to develop an IEEE standard - Recommended Practice for Organizational Governance of Artificial Intelligence. Her research team has won several best and outstanding paper awards at ACL, ACL and NeurIPS workshops.