Abstract:

The advances in language technologies has seen attempts at addressing increasingly complex tasks such as hate speech detection, in addition to longstanding tasks such as language generation and summarization. However, in spite of the advances and increased public and research attention to such tasks, language technologies broadly still broadly and widely cause social harms such as the propagation of social biases (in increasingly sensitive areas.

In this talk, I will discuss sources of biases and suggested technical interventions, in order to identity whether they address the underlying issues. In particular, I will attend to the political reality of how language technologies are deployed and what their use is. Through this discussion, I hope to highlight pathways for research on language technologies to be used in service of society.

 

Bio:

Zeerak Talat’s research seeks to, on one hand, examine how machine learning systems interact with our societies and the downstream effects of introducing machine learning to our society; and on the other, to develop tools for content moderation technologies to facilitate open democratic dialogue in online spaces. Zeerak is an incoming Chancellor’s Fellow (~Assistant/Junior Professor) at the Edinburgh Centre for Technomoral Futures and Informatics at Edinburgh University. They are currently a research fellow at Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence and a visiting research fellow at the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society. Prior to this, Zeerak was a post-doctoral fellow at the Digital Democracies Institute at Simon Fraser University, and received their Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Sheffield.