CSE 704

Fall 2021

Reg # 24931

Tuesdays 1:50 – 3:20 pm

NLP for Social Good

The widespread use of language-oriented AI solutions presents new opportunities to have a positive social impact. Much existing work on NLP for social good focuses on detecting or preventing harm, such as classifying hate speech, mitigating bias, or identifying signs of extremist behaviour. However, NLP research also offers the potential for positive, proactive applications that can improve user and public well-being or foster constructive conversations. A recent ACL workshop focused on NLP for Positive Impact. This seminar will focus on Socialbots, in one-on-one conversations and in online conversations.

• Conversational AI (Chatbots)

– Conversational AI Fundamentals, Alexa Prize

– Knowledge Grounded Dialogue Generation

– Purposeful conversation, prosocial, empathetic behavior

– Use of Prosody

– Multimodal socialbots

– Interdisciplinary perspectives (social science, psychology, communications)

– Evaluation of conversational bots

• Online Well-Being: Positive Information Sharing

– Combating disinformation: vaccine hesitancy, climate change, reinforcing positive stories

– Detection and interventions for dangerous speech

– Conversation monitoring and analytics

Prerequisites: CSE 535 or CSE 574 (ideally both)

Course Material:

Reading material will be made available on the piazza site.

Instructor: Rohini K. Srihari, Professor, Dept. of Computer Science & Eng

338D Davis Hall