Weekly Seminar: Philipp Koehn
October 28, 2024
When: October 31st @ 11am
Where: TMCB 1170
Talk title: Translation and Multilinguality in the Age of Large Language Models
Abstract: We currently witness a convergence in the field of natural language processing into a unifying framework built on foundational language models. This talk traces the development of these models out of the interplay of translation and language model research. Large language models have fundamentally changed how machine translation systems are currently being built. The talk will highlight where these technologies stand, what new capabilities language models enable for translation, and what constitutes best practices when building machine translation systems for deployment. The talk will also show how language models currently struggle to work well inlanguages beyond English and what can be done to address this.
Bio: Philipp Koehn has been working on machine translation for the last quarter century, published over 200 research papers and two textbooks on the topic. He received his PhD from the University of Southern California. He was a professor at the University of Edinburgh before he joined Johns Hopkins University in 2014. He is currently mainly working on machine translation, speech translation, and multilingual aspects of large language models.