Natural Language Processing

Talk Abstract

Imagine a world where you could simply ask your database a question in plain English and get the answer instantly. This dream began in the 1970s with E. F. Codd's pioneering work on a natural language question-and-answer system for relational databases. Over the decades, the quest for natural language interfaces for databases (NLIDBs) has seen many highs and lows, with contributions from database experts, machine learning enthusiasts, and NLP pioneers.

Along with collaborators Kevin Ashley, James Anderson, and Daqing He, Department of Computer Science faculty Diane Litman and Rebecca Hwa were awarded a 2022 Pitt Momentum Funds Scaling Grant for their work on the Center for Text Analytic Methods in Legal Studies.

Dr. Malihe Alikhani (Assistant Professor, CS) was awarded the best theme paper at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2021) for her paper "Including Signed Languages in Natural Language Processing." Dr. Alikhani worked with Dr.

In conjunction with undergraduate students Chloe Ciora and Nur Iren, Dr. Malihe Alikhani (Assistant Professor, CS) was awarded the best paper award at the 14th International Conference on Natural Language Generation for their paper "Examining Covert Gender Bias: A Case Study in Turkish and English Machine Translation Models." The work, which came out of Dr. Alikhani's AI ethics course from the spring 2021 semester, focuses on gender bias when translating from English to Turkish in different online translators.