Artificial Intelligence
Data Science
Algorithms
archimedes-Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, Algorithms-greece
greece
Algorithms
Data Science
Artificial Intelligence
[Archimedes Seminar Series] Uncertainty in NLP: Quantification, interpretation, evaluation and beyond
Dates
2024-07-03 11:00 - 13:00
Venue
Artemidos 1 - Amphitheater
Title: Uncertainty in NLP: Quantification, interpretation, evaluation and beyond.
Presenter: Prof Chrysoula (Chryssa) Zerva (Instituto Superior Tecnico, Portugal)
Abstract: As the popularity, availability (and size) of language models keep increasing, so do their applications to different tasks, rendering them ubiquitous in modern society. This, in turn, brings forward the question of reliability. We know models don’t always “know what they don’t know” and may end up generating seemingly convincing answers that are entirely wrong. Hence, being able to quantify the uncertainty over their predictions is a key step in the path towards the reliability of language models.
This talk will discuss the challenges of uncertainty estimation for natural language processing, emphasising aspects such as multiple sources of uncertainty and limited access to the model parameters (black box models) as well as aspects of interpretation and evaluation. I will focus on generation and evaluation tasks, using machine translation as the main paradigm, and discuss how the conformal prediction framework can be leveraged to provide meaningful confidence intervals with statistical guarantees, while also allowing us to calibrate our confidence to obtain more interpretable and fair uncertainty representations.
Bio: Dr. Chrysoula Zerva is an Assistant Professor in Artificial Intelligence at the Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon, Portugal and a researcher at the Lisbon branch of the Instituto de Telecomunicações. She is a member of the ELLIS network as well as a member of LUMLIS, the Lisbon ELLIS unit.
Dr. Chrysoula Zerva obtained her PhD in 2019 from the University of Manchester working on “Automated identification of textual uncertainty” under the supervision of Prof. Sophia Ananiadou. She was subsequently awarded the EPSRC doctoral prize fellowship to work on (mis)information propagation in the health and science domains. In 2021, she joined the Instituto de Telecomunicações in Lisbon as a post-doc researcher for the DeepSPIN project led by Prof. André Martins, focussing on uncertainty quantification, machine translation and quality estimation.
She is co-PI in the Centre of Responsible AI, a PRR-funded initiative aiming to promote AI technology that is trustworthy, privacy-preserving, sustainable and fair, contributing towards a more equal society. She is also participating in the UTTER project, which aims to advance transcription and translation for extended reality models, where she leads the work related to Adaptable and context-aware models. Overall, her research interests lie in the areas of machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP). In more detail, she is interested in topics of uncertainty (both in models and data), fairness, contextualization and explainability and is keen on exploring multilingual and multimodal setups along the aforementioned directions.
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Vision
To position Greece as a leading player in AI and Data Science
Mission
To build an AI Excellence Hub in Greece where the international research community can connect, groundbreaking ideas can thrive, and the next generation of scientists emerges, shaping a brighter future for Greece and the world
Welcome to ARCHIMEDES, a vibrant research hub connecting the global AI and Data Science research community fostering groundbreaking research in Greece and beyond. Its dedicated core team, comprising lead researchers, affiliated researchers, Post-Docs, PhDs and interns, is committed to advancing basic and applied research in Artificial Intelligence and its supporting disciplines, including Algorithms, Statistics, Learning Theory, and Game Theory organized around 8 core research areas. By collaborating with Greek and Foreign Universities and Research Institutes, ARCHIMEDES disseminates its research findings fostering knowledge exchange and providing enriching opportunities for students. Leveraging AI to address real-world challenges, ARCHIMEDES promotes innovation within the Greek ecosystem and extends its societal impact. Established in January 2022, as a research unit of the Athena Research Center with support from the Committee Greece 2021, ARCHIMEDES is funded for its first four years by the EU Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF).
Christos Papadimitriou Speaks on “Artificial Intelligence: its History, its Present, and its Uncertain Future”
24 March 2026
Christos Papadimitriou, Donovan Family Professor of Computer Science at Columbia Engineering at Columbia University, USA, and Principal Scientist at the Archimedes Research Unit of the Athena Research Center, Greece, spoke about “Artificial Intelligence: its History, its Present, and its Uncertain Future” during the ten-year anniversary event of diaNEOsis think tank, which took place on March 11, 2026, at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center (SNFCC).
Vasia Papanikou to Present the MIMOSA Fairness Exploration Tool at EDBT/ICDT 2026 Joint Conference
24 March 2026
Vasia Papanikou, a PhD student at the University of Ioannina and an Academic fellow at Archimedes, Athena Research Center, Greece, will be demonstrating "MIMOSA: A Tool for Fairness Exploration Through Explanations" at the 29th International Conference on Extending Database Technology (EDBT/ICDT 2026), taking place from March 24–27, 2026, at Tampere, Finland.
Archimedes Academic Fellow Andreas Lolos Presents Research at WACV 2026
16 March 2026
Archimedes Academic Fellow and a third-year PhD student at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens in Greece, Andreas Lolos recently travelled to Tucson in Arizona, USA, and presented the paper "SGPMIL: Sparse Gaussian Process Multiple Instance Learning" at the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV 2026).
6 Accepted Papers at ICLR 2026
11 March 2026
The Archimedes research unit of the Athena Research Center in Greece has six papers accepted at this year's International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) gathering, including one oral presentation. The acceptance rate for posters was about 25,8% and about 1,1% for oral presentations. Please bear in mind that ICLR, along with NeurIPS and ICML, is considered one of the three top-tier artificial intelligence and machine learning conferences in the world.
The project “ARCHIMEDES Unit: Research in Artificial Intelligence, Data Science and Algorithms” with code OPS 5154714 is implemented by the National Recovery and Resilience Plan “Greece 2.0” and is funded by the European Union – NextGenerationEU.
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