Prof. Monojit Choudhury,  Mohd bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), Abu Dhabi gave a talk on  LLMs for Everybody: How inclusive are the LLMs today and Why should we care? on 17 January.

Here is the summary of his talk: Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionised the field of NLP and natural human-computer interactions; they hold a lot of promise but are these promises equitable across countries, languages, and other demographic groups? Research from his group as well as from around the world is constantly revealing that LLMs are biassed in terms of their language processing abilities in most but a few of the world’s languages, cultural awareness (or lack thereof), and value alignment. In this talk, Prof. Choudhury highlighted some of his team’s recent findings around value alignment bias in the models and argued why they need models that can reason generically across moral values and cultural conventions. 

He also discussed some of the opportunities for students at the postgraduate, Ph.D, and Post-doctoral levels at the newly founded MBZUAI University.

Monojit Choudhury is a professor of Natural Language Processing at Mohd bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), Abu Dhabi. Before this, he was a principal scientist at Microsoft Research Lab and Microsoft Turing, India. He is also a professor of practice at Plaksha University and an adjunct professor at IIIT Hyderabad. Prof Choudhury’s research interests lie in the intersection of NLP, Social and Cultural aspects of Technology use, and Ethics. In particular, he has been working on multilingual aspects of large language models (LLMs), their use in low-resource languages, and making LLMs more inclusive and safer by addressing bias and fairness aspects. Prof Choudhury is the general chair of the Indian National Linguistics Olympiad and the founding co-chair of the Asia-Pacific Linguistics Olympiad. He holds a B.Tech and Ph.D degree in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Kharagpur.

January 2024