Look Who's Talking: Stanford Linguists at NAACL 2022

The 2022 North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) in Seattle on July 10-15 was a chance for many current and former Stanford NLP Group members to get together in person for the first time in years. Alum Marie-Catherine de Marneffe (Ph.D. '12) was the program co-chair.  Also attending were faculty Chris Manning,  Dan Jurafsky, and Chris Potts, together with alums Sam Bowman (Ph.D. '16), Sebastian Schuster (Ph.D. '20), Julia Mendelsohn (B.A. '18), among others.

Several current Stanford linguists presented their work and participated in the conference: 

• Keshav Santhanam, Omar Khattab, Jon Saad-Falcon, Christopher Potts, Matei Zaharia presented "ColBERTv2: Effective and Efficient Retrieval via Lightweight Late Interaction."
• Zhengxuan Wu, Atticus Geiger, Joshua Rozner, Elisa Kreiss, Hanson Lu, Thomas Icard, Christopher Potts, Noah Goodman presented "Causal Distillation for Language Models."
• Stanford professor Chris Manning and alum Emily Bender (Ph.D. '01) were panelists on The place of linguistics and symbolic structures panel, a moderated discussion on the role of linguistics and symbolic representations in NLP. 
• Chris Potts gave an invited talk on "Lexical semantics in the time of large language models" reporting on joint work with Erika Petersen in the Dimensions of Meaning: Distributional and Curated Semantics Workshop.
• Judith Degen spoke at the UnImplicit Workshop on the topic of "How can neural language models be leveraged for pragmatic theory-building?"

Check out the full overview of the conference and the conference brochure. And see this posting in the Stanford AI Blog for a compendium of all Stanford related talks at this year's NAACL!