The Computer Science Distinguished Lecture Series (DLS) is an ongoing program in the Department of Computer Science (CS) that invites distinguished leaders to present lectures to the computing community. Since it began in the Fall of 2000, the DLS has successfully hosted many prominent computer scientists.

On Friday, November 8th, 2024 at 2:30 pm, the DLS is proud to present Lyle Ungar, Professor of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Ungar will present a lecture titled “Measuring Cultural Variation using Natural Language Processing.” The lecture will be held in New Computer Science, Room 120.

Cultures vary widely in how they view the world, for example being more individualist or collectivist. Such cultural differences are, of course, reflected in words that people use. Ungar will first show a variety of ways in which multilingual language models are not multicultural; they speak Hindi or Mandarin, but still think like Americans. He will then present a scalable method that uses embedding-derived lexica to successfully measure regional culture variations. 

Ungar holds secondary appointments in Psychology, Bioengineering, Genomics and Computational Biology, and Operations, Information and Decisions. His group uses natural language processing and explainable AI for psychological research, including analyzing social media and cell phone sensor data to better understand what drives physical and mental well-being. They are currently building socio-emotionally sensitive GPT-based tutors and coaches.