BIU learning club – Jonathan Berant – Retrieval in the age of large language models

Location:

Engineering building (1103), room 329 

Title:

Retrieval in the age of large language models

Abstract:

Large language models have revolutionized natural language processing. However, such models have a limited receptive field and cannot be applied directly on tasks that require processing entire corpora. In this talk, I will talk about the role of information retrieval in the new landscape of LLM, and show how better retrieval can dramatically improve the performance of large language models for in-context learning and compositional generalization. Moreover, I will discuss retrieval models for open-domain question answering and a new approach for understanding and improving their performance.

Short Bio:

Jonathan Berant is an associate professor at the School of Computer Science at Tel Aviv University and chief scientist of Ask-AI. Jonathan earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science at Tel-Aviv University, under the supervision of Prof. Ido Dagan. Jonathan was a post-doctoral fellow at Stanford University, working with Prof. Christopher Manning and Prof. Percy Liang, and subsequently a post-doctoral fellow at Google Research, Mountain View. Jonathan Received several awards and fellowships including The Rothschild fellowship, The ACL 2011 best student paper award, EMNLP 2014 best paper award, NAACL 2019 best resource paper award, and several honorable mentions. Jonathan has won the Kadar prize for outstanding research and is currently an ERC grantee.