AI Paper Spotlights - Geographical Erasure in Language Generation

“AI Paper Spotlights” - explore the latest technological advancements in the dynamic field of AI.

In this event hosted by Merantix Momentum, Pola Schwöbel (Applied Scientist at AWS) will share insights from her EMNLP 2023 Findings paper on Geographical Erasure in Language Generation. Large language models (LLMs) possess extensive world knowledge but are susceptible to encoding information biased towards dominant groups due to their training on vast internet datasets.

The paper delves into a form of geographical erasure, where certain countries are underpredicted by language models. Pola will highlight consistent instances of erasure across various LLMs, revealing a strong correlation with low frequencies of country mentions in the training data. Additionally, the talk will explore methods to mitigate erasure by finetuning the LLM using a custom objective function.

The presentation will conclude with a brief overview of other responsible AI projects undertaken by the team. Learn, discuss, and stay informed about the responsible development of AI!

About the speaker:
Pola Schwöbel got her PhD in 2022 from the Technical University of Denmark doing research on probabilistic machine learning, invariance learning and AI ethics. After that, she joined AWS in Berlin as an Applied Scientist where she works on responsible AI.

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**Entrance will be closed at 7PM!

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