You enter a dark forest. Standing in front of you is:

A professor named Hal Daumé III (he/him). He wields appointments in Computer Science where he is a Perotto Professor, as well as Language Science at UMD (in Fall 2022 he will teach Human-AI Interaction and in Fall 2021 he is taught Just Machine Learning); he is also a Senior Principal Researcher the machine learning and fairness groups at Microsoft Research NYC. He and his wonderful advisees like to study questions related to how to get machines to becomes more adept at human language (and artificial intelligence tasks more broadly), by developing models and algorithms that allow them to learn from data. (Keywords: natural language processing and machine learning.) The two major questions that really drive their research these days are:

    (1) how can we get computers to learn
        through natural interaction with people/users?

and (2) how can we do this in a way that minimize harms
        in the learned models?

He's discussed interactive learning informally in a Talking Machines Podcast and more technically in recent talks; and has discussed fairness/bias in broad terms in a (now somewhat outdated) blog post. He is the author of the online textbook A Course in Machine Learning, which is fully open source.

Hal is super fortunate to be a member of, and have awesome colleagues in the Computional Linguistics and Information Processing Lab (which he formerly directed), the Human-Computer Interaction Lab, and the Center for Machine Learning. If you want to contact him, email is your best bet; you can also find him on @haldaume3 on Twitter. Or, in person, in his office (IRB 4150).

If you're a prospective grad student or grad applicant, please read his FAQ to answer some common questions. If you're thinking of inviting him for a talk or event, please ensure that the event is organized in an inclusive manner (inclusion rider). More generally, if you are organizing a conference, workshop or other event, you may wish to read the NeurIPS D&I survey results (joint with Katherine Heller), Humberto Corona's collection of resources/advice, or two blog posts on this topic.

I acknowledge that I live and work on the ancestral and unceded lands of the Piscataway People, who were among the first in the Western Hemisphere to encounter European colonists, as well as the lands of the Lenape and Nacotchtank people.

Recent Publications:

Theory-Grounded Measurement of U.S. Social Stereotypes in English Language Models
Yang Trista Cao, Anna Sotnikova, Hal Daumé III, Rachel Rudinger and Linda Zou
Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL), 2022
[Abstract] [BibTeX]

NLP models trained on text have been shown to reproduce human stereotypes, which can magnify harms to marginalized groups when systems are deployed at scale. We adapt the Agency-Belief-Communion (ABC) stereotype model of Koch et al. (2016) from social psychology as a framework for the systematic study and discovery of stereotypic group-trait associations in language models (LMs). We introduce the sensitivity test (SeT) for measuring stereotypical associations from language models. To evaluate SeT and other measures using the ABC model, we collect group-trait judgments from U.S.-based subjects to compare with English LM stereotypes. Finally, we extend this framework to measure LM stereotyping of intersectional identities.

@inproceedings{daume22stereotypes,
title = {Theory-Grounded Measurement of U.S. Social Stereotypes in English
Language Models},
author = {Yang Trista Cao and Anna Sotnikova and Daum\'e, III, Hal and Rachel
Rudinger and Linda Zou},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the Conference of the North American Chapter of the
Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL)},
year = {2022},
url = {http://hal3.name/docs/#daume22stereotypes},
}


Heterogeneous Supervised Topic Models
Dhanya Sridhar, Hal Daumé III and David Blei
TACL, 2022
[Abstract] [BibTeX]

Researchers in the social sciences are often interested in the relationship between text and an outcome of interest, where the goal is to both uncover latent patterns in the text and predict outcomes for unseen texts. To this end, this paper develops the heterogeneous supervised topic models (HSTM), a probabilistic approach to text analysis and prediction. HSTMs posit a joint model of text and outcomes to find heterogeneous patterns that help with both text analysis and prediction. The main benefit of HSTMs is that they capture heterogeneity in the relationship between text and the outcome across latent topics. To fit HSTMs, we develop a variational inference algorithm based on the auto-encoding variational Bayes framework. We study the performance of HSTMs on eight datasets and find that they consistently outperform related methods, including fine-tuned black box models. Finally, we apply HSTMs to analyze news articles labeled with pro- or anti-tone. We find evidence of differing language used to signal a pro- and anti-tone.

@inproceedings{daume22hstm,
title = {Heterogeneous Supervised Topic Models},
author = {Dhanya Sridhar and Daum\'e, III, Hal and David Blei},
booktitle = {TACL},
year = {2022},
url = {http://hal3.name/docs/#daume22hstm},
}


Deconstructing NLG Evaluation: Evaluation Practices, Assumptions, and Their Implications
Kaitlyn Zhou, Su Lin Blodgett, Adam Trischler, Hal Daumé III, Kaheer Suleman and Alexandra Olteanu
Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL), 2022
[Abstract] [BibTeX]

There are many ways to express similar things in text, which makes evaluating natural language generation (NLG) systems difficult. Compounding this difficulty is the need to assess varying quality criteria depending on the deployment setting. While the landscape of NLG evaluation has been well-mapped, practitioners' goals, assumptions, and constraints -- which inform decisions about what, when, and how to evaluate -- are often partially or implicitly stated, or not stated at all. Combining a formative semi-structured interview study of NLG practitioners (N=18) with a survey study of a broader sample of practitioners (N=61), we surface goals, community practices, assumptions, and constraints that shape NLG evaluations, examining their implications and how they embody ethical considerations.

@inproceedings{daume22nlg,
title = {Deconstructing NLG Evaluation: Evaluation Practices, Assumptions, and
Their Implications},
author = {Kaitlyn Zhou and Su Lin Blodgett and Adam Trischler and Daum\'e, III,
Hal and Kaheer Suleman and Alexandra Olteanu},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the Conference of the North American Chapter of the
Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL)},
year = {2022},
url = {http://hal3.name/docs/#daume22nlg},
}


Learning When and What to Ask: a Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning Framework
Khanh Nguyen, Yonatan Bisk and Hal Daumé III
International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2022
[Abstract] [BibTeX]

Reliable AI agents should be mindful of the limits of their knowledge and consult humans when sensing that they do not have sufficient knowledge to make sound decisions. We formulate a hierarchical reinforcement learning framework for learning to decide when to request additional information from humans and what type of information would be helpful to request. Our framework extends partially-observed Markov decision processes (POMDPs) by allowing an agent to interact with an assistant to leverage their knowledge in accomplishing tasks. Results on a simulated human-assisted navigation problem demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework: aided with an interaction policy learned by our method, a navigation policy achieves up to a 7x improvement in task success rate compared to performing tasks only by itself. The interaction policy is also efficient: on average, only a quarter of all actions taken during a task execution are requests for information. We analyze benefits and challenges of learning with a hierarchical policy structure and suggest directions for future work.

@inproceedings{daume22ask,
title = {Learning When and What to Ask: a Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning
Framework},
author = {Khanh Nguyen and Yonatan Bisk and Daum\'e, III, Hal},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on Machine Learning
(ICML)},
year = {2022},
url = {http://hal3.name/docs/#daume22ask},
}


Toward Gender-Inclusive Coreference Resolution: An Analysis of Gender and Bias Throughout the Machine Learning Lifecycle
Yang Trista Cao and Hal Daumé III
Computational Linguistics, 2022
[Abstract] [BibTeX]

Correctly resolving textual mentions of people fundamentally entails making inferences about those people. Such inferences raise the risk of systematic biases in coreference resolution systems, including biases that can harm binary and non-binary trans and cis stakeholders. To better understand such biases, we foreground nuanced conceptualizations of gender from sociology and sociolinguistics, and investigate where in the machine learning pipeline such biases can enter a coreference resolution system. We inspect many existing data sets for trans-exclusionary biases, and develop two new data sets for interrogating bias in both crowd annotations and in existing coreference resolution systems. Through these studies, conducted on English text, we confirm that without acknowledging and building systems that recognize the complexity of gender, we will build systems that fail for: quality of service …

@inproceedings{daume22coref,
title = {Toward Gender-Inclusive Coreference Resolution: An Analysis of Gender
and Bias Throughout the Machine Learning Lifecycle},
author = {Yang Trista Cao and Daum\'e, III, Hal},
booktitle = {Computational Linguistics},
year = {2022},
url = {http://hal3.name/docs/#daume22coref},
}


More papers please!

Recent Talks:

AI UK: Doing better in data science – from algorithmic fairness to diversity
Anjali Mazumder, Shakir Mohamed, Danielle Belgrave, Maria De-Arteaga, and Hal Daumé III
The Alan Turing Institute AI UK Roadmap, March 2021
[Video]

Coded Bias Panel Discussion at the University of Maryland
Margrét Bjarnadóttir, Nicol Turner Lee, Deborah Raji, Adam Wenchel, and Hal Daumé III (moderator)
March, 2021
[Video]

Responsible AI Systems and Experiences
Abolfazl Asudeh (moderator), Hal Daumé III, Golnoosh Farnadi, Bernease Herman, Bill Howe (moderator), Yuval Moskovitch, Katie Shilton, and Jenn Wortman Vaughan
Panel at VLDB 2021
[Video]

Tech Ethics in a Changing World
Catherine Bannister, Mary Lacity, Cindy Moehring, and Hal Daumé III
Northwest Arkansas Tech Summit, 2021
[Video]

Language (Technology) Is Power: Exploring the Inherent Complexity of NLP Systems
Hal Daumé III and Sam Charrington (host)
TWIML AI Podcast, 2020
[Video]

More talks please!

Contact information:

    email: me AT hal3 DOT name               skype: haldaume3
    phone: 301-405-1073                    twitter: haldaume3
   office: IRB 4150                         github: hal3

I can't reply to all prospective students email; please read this before emailing me.

credits: design and font inspired by Seth Able's LoRD, some images converted to ANSI using ManyTools, original drawing of me by anonymous.
last updated on nine june, two thousand twenty two.