In line with the spirit of the workshop, the goal of this panel is to explore the area situated at the intersection between Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence.
In the workshop we would like to feed a discussion about the latest trends born in the international and national community related to Natural Language Processing (such as the massive adoption of Neural Networks), but also discuss the successes and limitations of emerging methodologies, models and technologies, with a view on their societal impact.
The discussion will be fed by (at least some of) the following questions:
- How do you judge neural approaches to language w.r.t. to “traditional” logic-based or statistical-based ones: given their accuracy are they sufficient to evolve in the long term? Are both approaches to be integrated and how?
- Where do you think the challenges/limitations/advantages lie?
- What do you think about new Researches Aiming at solving the Problem of AI Bias in “Black Box” Algorithms?
- As an example, do conversational agents really need explicit symbols about “what they talking about”?
- Is Strong AI ever going to ‘come back’? Could recent technological advancements make this a possibility?
- AI and language: some systems managed to pass the Turing test by ‘fooling’ their interlocutors. Can we say that the Turing test is really passed? Are we bound to create new and more advanced Turing’s tests?
- Do we have need novel evaluation metrics? Is the future driven by a “field experiments” perspective on evaluation or new, more elaborated, automated metrics are needed?
- Is NL important to amplify the impact of AI on Society?
- Is NLP useful to limit the AI risk to generate mass unemployment?
- Is it able to give rise to new and unforeseen opportunities?
- Natural Languages have been the hosting device for reasoning, challenging and defining ethics. Is NLP playing any role in the increasingly crucial AI and ethics topic?
- Can we help in devising an ‘ethical’ AI?
Invited Panelists: Giuseppe Attardi, Roberto Basili and Giovanni Semeraro
Discussants: the Workshop Organizers, the three panel speakers, all other attendants.