T for “Terrorist,” “Tropical” or “Territorial”? Teachings Ethics to Large Language Models

Large language models and their multilingual counterparts have revolutionized the way we build Natural Language Technology, to an extent that often seems magical. At the same time, LLMs are also known to display strong social biases that pick up from the data these models are trained on. Therefore, one of the key challenges we face today, especially in the industry, is about building language technology that will enable and delight the users, and at the same time will minimize the potential harms due to the biases in LMs. In this talk, I will take a few case studies of real-world technologies – chat bots and text prediction - to illustrate the various principles and challenges of “Responsible AI” and ways to mitigate the harms without compromising on the performance of the systems.

Speaker Biography:

Dr. Monojit Choudhury is currently a Principal Applied Scientist at Microsoft Turing, and previously was a Principal researcher at Microsoft Research Lab India. His research interests span various aspects of natural language processing and cognitive sciences, including multilingual models, ethics of NLP and AI and NLP for social good. Dr. Choudhury is a Prof of Practice at Plaksha University and had previously served as adjunct faculty at IIIT Hyderabad and IIT Kharagpur. He is the general chair of the Panini Linguistics Olympiad, which is the Indian national linguistics Olympiad for high school students, and is actively involved with the International as well as Asia Pacific linguistics Olympiads. Dr. Choudhury has a PhD and BTech in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Kharagpur.