Cornellians took home an impressive number of awards at the 61st annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), held July 9-14 in Toronto.
The ACL annual meeting is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing research. The sheer number of awards given to researchers from the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science demonstrates the college's leading scholarship in this area.
Most notably, a Cornell team won the Best Paper Award for “Do Androids Laugh at Electric Sheep? Humor ‘Understanding’ Benchmarks from The New Yorker Caption Contest.” The team used more than 700 hundred entries to the New Yorker magazine’s Cartoon Caption Contest to investigate whether AI can "understand" humor. (Learn more in the news story, That's funny - but AI models don't get the joke.)
Jack Hessel, Ph.D. ’20, now a research scientist at the Allen Institute for AI (AI2), is the lead author on the study. Lillian Lee ’93, the Charles Roy Davis Professor of computer science and information science, and Yejin Choi, Ph.D. ’10, are co-authors on the paper.
The following Cornell researchers also received awards:
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Jacob Sharf, a research and development engineer at Cornell Tech, Mustafa Omer Gul, a doctoral student in the field of computer science, and Yoav Artzi, associate professor of computer science at Cornell Tech, won one of two Outstanding Demo Paper Awards for their work, "CB2: Collaborative Natural Language Interaction Research Platform." The paper was selected from a record 155 submissions.
Several Cornell alumni were also recognized:
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Esin Durmus, Ph.D. '21, and co-authors won the single Social Impact Award for their work, "Marked Personas: Using Natural Language Prompts to Measure Stereotypes in Language Models."
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Alane Suhr, Ph.D. '22, and Yejin Choi, Ph.D. '10, worked with a team that won one of several Outstanding Paper Awards for "Minding Language Models’ (Lack of) Theory of Mind: A Plug-and-Play Multi-Character Belief Tracker."
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Filip Radlinski, Ph.D. '08, won an Area Chair Award in Semantics for the paper "Resolving Indirect Referring Expressions for Entity Selection."
Chenhao Tan, Ph.D. '16, received one of three Outstanding Senior Area Chair Awards.