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Colloquium: Towards Literate Artificial Intelligence

Event Details

Date
Monday, February 18, 2019
Time
4-5 p.m.
Location
Description

Abstract:Over the past decade, the field of artificial intelligence (AI) has seen striking developments. Yet, today’s AI systems sorely lack the essence of human intelligence i.e. our ability to (a) understand language and grasp its meaning, (b) assimilate common-sense and background knowledgeof the world, and (c) draw inferences and perform reasoning. Before we even begin to build AI systems that possess the aforementioned human abilities, we must ask an even more fundamental question: How would we even evaluate an AI system on the aforementioned abilities? In my work, I argue that we can evaluate AI systems in the same way as we evaluate our children - by giving them standardized tests. Standardized tests are administered to students to measure the knowledge and skills gained by them. Thus, it is natural to use these tests to measure the intelligence of our AI systems. 

In this talk, I will describe Parsing to Programs (P2P), a framework that combines ideas from semantic parsing and probabilistic programming for situated question answering. We used P2P to build systems that solve pre-university level Euclidean geometry and Newtonian physics examinations. P2P achieves a performance at least as well as the average student on questions from textbooks, geometry questions from previous SAT exams, and mechanics questions from Advanced Placement (AP) exams. I will conclude by describing implications of this research and some ideas for future work.

Cost
Free

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