CDS Professor Earns NSF CAREER & Google Research Collabs Awards
CDS Assistant Professor of Linguistics, Data Science, and Computer Science Sam Bowman recently earned both a National Science Foundation CAREER award as well as Google Research Collabs Award.
Sam’s project funded by the NSF Career Award focuses on language problems in AI systems, addressing the lack of efficiency in crowd work which is when a large population of non-specialists are hired to produce example answers to questions, example summaries of documents, etc. Utilizing a diverse group of people to provide data for pay is intended to enable the building of specialized language technology systems quickly, and to ensure that they can cover a wide range of language styles, however this does not always work well in real life. Often, crowd work is organized in a way that forces participants to work in a rushed and sloppy manner. This results in data that’s ineffective at actually teaching machines what we want them to learn. Thus, this project seeks to solve this problem by “developing and evaluating best practices for crowd worker training, feedback, and bonus pay to help crowd-worker dataset creators develop professional skills and produce better data that will lead to truly effective language technologies”. The award will also support training for new scientists and engineers, including targeting advanced technical students and leveraging outreach events directed at newcomers to the field. It will include both an education and outreach program; the former will develop a research mentorship initiative for undergraduate and MS students at NYU and the latter will establish a recurring workshop series for early-year undergraduates interested in careers in AI and language technology.
Sam’s Google Research Collabs project, “Complex NLP data collection at Scale with Diverse Crowds”, is in collaboration with CDS PhD student Nikita Nangia, and Google Research NYC members Jennimaria Palomaki and Lora Aroyo.
For more information on Sam’s research, please visit his website.
By Ashley C. McDonald
