This is the home of NLP with Friends,
an online seminar series made by students, for students, where everyone is invited!
About the Seminar
We meet Wednesdays on a bi-weekly basis to talk about interesting work in NLP and related areas. The presenters are students, who will talk about their own work (both ongoing and already published). Links are distributed through our mailing list.
The idea for this setting is to be a supportive and engaging environment for students to present their work and discuss work with other students and researchers around the world.
Following each talk (or during, if the presenter allows) there will be time to ask questions, discuss relevant topics, and wonder about what’s next.
We expect everyone to follow our code of conduct to make this a respectful forum.
The official language of the seminar is English.
We hope this format will foster greater kinship between students around the globe, provide students greater access to seminars and experience presenting, create a judgement-free forum in which to ask questions, and give us all a chance to learn from each other – both successes and failures!
We are committed to diversity of topics and presenters; we hope to connect students all over the world, and give the stage to a range of topics and speakers.
We hope some day you’ll join us (so we’re not the only ones… in Zoom)!
About the Organizers
Zhaofeng Wu is a PhD student at MIT, where he is working on model analysis and on figuring out what he is going to work on next. In his spare time he can be found chasing after a soccer ball with twenty-one other people, though in cruel Boston winters this number drastically decreases.
Sumanth Doddapaneni is a PhD candidate at Indian Institute of Technology Madras, where he works on multilingual natural language processing and a tad bit of speech technology. In his spare time he could be found cooking, baking and resisting the urge to grab an ice cream.
Brihi Joshi is a PhD student at the University of Southern California, where she dabbles with explainable and label-efficient NLP methods. In her spare time, she is seen contemplating an alternate career in music or scrolling cat memes.
Kayo Yin is a PhD student at UC Berkeley, where she works on an ecletic mix of NLP/ML research. In her spare time she can be found playing music by dead composers and triggering mini avalanches while backcountry snowboarding.
Organizers of the Past1
Yanai Elazar was a PhD candidate at Bar-Ilan University, where he worked on neural representations, model analysis and missing elements. In his spare time he could be found nourishing flour-based organisms and converting them into bread.
Abhilasha Ravichander was a PhD candidate at Carnegie Mellon University, where she worked on robust language understanding, including problems in interpretability, evaluation and computational reasoning. In her spare time she talked her plants into staying alive.
Liz Salesky was a PhD candidate at Johns Hopkins University, where she worked on machine translation and computational linguistics. In her spare time she could be found biking to ice cream and bingeing Duolingo.
Zeerak Waseem was a PhD candidate at the University of Sheffield, where he worked on abusive language detection and fairness in machine learning, and in his spare time he could be found napping.
1 We use the past tense to mark that the organizers have graduated, rather than passed on.
