19 Oct PhD Defence for Farhad Nooralahzadeh 30th October 2020

Farhad Nooralahzadeh a SIRIUS-financed PhD fellow, will be defending his thesis on Friday 30th October 2020. You can read the official announcement of the defence at the University of Oslo webpages. The defence will be run using video conferencing.

He is s defending the thesis Low-Resource Adaptation of Neural NLP Models.

Real-world applications of natural language processing (NLP) are challenging. NLP models rely heavily on supervised machine learning and require copious amounts of annotated data. These resources are often based on language data available in massive quantities, such as English newswires. However, in real-world applications of NLP, the textual resources vary across several dimensions, such as language, dialect, topic, and genre. It is challenging to find annotated data of sufficient amount and quality. The objective of this thesis is to investigate methods for dealing with such low-resource scenarios in information extraction and natural language understanding. To this end, we study distant supervision and sequential transfer learning in various low-resource settings. We develop and adapt neural NLP models to explore several research questions concerning NLP tasks with minimal or no training data.

During his time at SIRIUS, Farhad has collaborated with Schlumberger and IBM. He was also an UTFORSK exchange fellow at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul.

Trial Lecture

His trial lecture will be on “Natural Language Inference: Datasets, Methods, Current Challenges and What’s Next”