Eugene Charniak Memorial Symposium

Friday, November 8 - Saturday, November 9
Brown Computer Science Department, Providence, RI

Brown University held an academic memorial event to commemorate the research and legacy of Eugene Charniak. Eugene, an ACL Lifetime Achievement Award winner and ACL fellow, passed away in June 2023. His colleagues and students organized a two-day workshop of invited presentations of cutting-edge research with an emphasis on the themes which defined Eugene's career: the legacy of classic statistical NLP/ML, the sometimes-surprising effectiveness of simple baselines, clever tricks for dealing with data sparsity such as self-training or distant supervision, unsupervised learning, and frame-based representations of knowledge for planning and natural language understanding.

Program

Friday, November 8 (recording)

9:00am Breakfast and check in   CIT 3rd Floor Atrium
9:45am Welcoming - Amy Greenwald   CIT 368
10:00am Ellie Pavlick Back to BS*: Why Syntax and Structure Still Matter in the Age of LLMs CIT 368
10:20am Regina Barzilay The Power of Simple CIT 368
10:40am

Graeme Hirst

Frames, Inference, and Understanding: Eugene's first twenty years

 CIT 368
11:00am Coffee break   CIT 3rd Floor Atrium
11:20am Chris Tanner Tokenization is More Than Compression CIT 368
11:40am Michael Littman AI & You, Gene CIT 368
12:00pm Lunch (catered)   CIT 3rd Floor Atrium
1:30pm Byron Wallace 'The title may be dull, but it is a very good description', or, some of Eugene’s invaluable advice on interdisciplinary NLP research CIT 368
1:50pm Lillian Lee Do Androids Laugh at Electric Sheep? Humor "Understanding" Benchmarks from The New Yorker Caption Contest CIT 368
2:10pm Michael Collins Treebank Parsing and Eugene CIT 368
2:30pm Coffee break   CIT 3rd Floor Atrium
2:50pm 

Panel discussion

Moderator:

Micha Elsner

Eugene's legacy and the State of NLP

Panelists:

Spencer Caplan
Matthew Lease
Rebecca Mason
Noah Smith

 CIT 368
3:50pm Coffee break   CIT 3rd Floor Atrium
4:10pm Keynote talk - Mark Johnson How Large Language Models change Computational Linguistics CIT 368
4:50pm Closing - Aaron Charniak   CIT 368
6:00pm Cocktails, music, and dinner Directions from CIT Brown Faculty Club

Saturday, November 9 (recording)

9:00am Breakfast   CIT 3rd Floor Atrium
9:40am Sharon Goldwater Unsupervised learning from speech (including some "simple" baselines) CIT 368
10:00am

Brian Roark

 Empirical methods in context-aware transliteration CIT 368
10:20am John Hale The Cognitive Side of Charniak CIT 368
10:40am Keith Hall Synthetic Data: Almost As Good As The Real Thing CIT 368
11:00am Coffee break   CIT 3rd Floor Atrium
11:20am Ani Nenkova So, you killed the Queen: trade-offs between text generation and text extraction in 2002 and now CIT 368
11:40am Jason Eisner Recovering Syntactic Structure from Surface Features CIT 368
12:00pm Lunch and closing (catered)   CIT 3rd Floor Atrium

Virtual options

The event was livestreamed and recorded for virtual attendees. Please find links to the livestreams below:

Questions? Please get in touch with the organizers Micha Elsner (melsner0@gmail.com) and David McClosky (david_mcclosky@alumni.brown.edu).