Keynote Speakers
特邀报告1：Kevin Knight
Title: 30 Years of Perplexity
Abstract: NLP scientists have been trying for decades to accurately predict the next word in running text. Why were we so determined to succeed at this strange task? How did we track our successes and failures? Why was word prediction at the center of early statistical work in text compression, machine translation, and speech recognition? Will it lead to artificial general intelligence (AGI) in the 2020s? I’ll attempt to answer these questions with formulas and anecdotes drawn from three decades of research in NLP, text compression, and code-breaking.
Bio: Dr. Kevin Knight served on the faculty of the University of Southern California (26 years), as Chief Scientist at Language Weaver, Inc. (9 years), and as Chief Scientist for Natural Language Processing at Didi Global (4 years). He received a PhD in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University and a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University. Dr. Knight’s research interests include machine translation, natural language generation, automata theory, decipherment of historical documents, and number theory. He has co-authored over 150 research papers on natural language processing, as well as the widely-adopted textbook “Artificial Intelligence” (McGraw-Hill). Dr. Knight served as President of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) in 2011, as General Chair for ACL in 2005, as General Chair for the North American ACL (NAACL) in 2016, and as co-program chair for the inaugural Asia-Pacific ACL (2020). He received an Outstanding Paper Award at NAACL 2018, and Test-of-Time awards at ACL 2022 and ACL 2023. He is a Fellow of the ACL as well as the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).
特邀报告 2：宗成庆
Title: 从多个视角看机器翻译
Abstract: 近年来，大语言模型快速发展，机器翻译性能不断提升，在很多领域资源丰富语言对上的译文质量已经达到实用或基本实用的水平。那么，机器翻译未来的研究方向和发展出路是什么？本报告将首先对机器翻译技术现状做简要分析，从多个视角剖析当前面临的主要问题和挑战，然后介绍本团队近期在多模态机器翻译研究中取得的部分进展，最后从多个维度对机器翻译技术未来的发展方向及趋势进行预测和展望。
Bio: 宗成庆 中国科学院自动化研究所研究员，IEEE/ ACL/ AAIA/ CAAI/ CCF Fellow。他主要从事自然语言处理、机器翻译和语言认知计算等研究。主持国家级重要项目10余项，出版专著6部、译著2部。现任国际计算语言学学会(ACL)副主席、中国中文信息处理学会副理事长，曾任亚洲自然语言处理学会主席，国际顶级学术会议ACL 2015程序委员会主席和ACL 2021大会主席，ACM TALLIP 副主编和《自动化学报》副主编。荣获国家科技进步奖二等奖、北京市科学技术奖一等奖、教育部自然科学奖二等奖、北京市优秀教师、中国科学院优秀导师和国科大李佩教学名师等奖励和荣誉。 享受国务院政府特殊津贴。