At the 11th International Summer School on AI and Big Data, Prof. Mehwish Alam (Télécom Paris, France) will give a keynote speech on Language Models and Symbolic AI.

Keynote: Language Models and Symbolic AI

Language models have been around for a long time, forming a foundational component of various Natural Language Processing systems (NLP). In recent years, however, advances in neural networks have given rise to powerful, masked, large-scale neural language models that capture vast amounts of textual semantic information. While these models demonstrate remarkable results in NLP tasks, they still face challenges in reasoning, dynamic knowledge access, and interpretability. Conversely, language models can enhance symbolic systems through tasks like knowledge graph completion. This talk explores this intersection of language models and symbolic AI, highlighting various algorithms and frameworks developed based on language models for knowledge graph completion, taxonomy refinement, and other downstream tasks such as author name disambiguation. This talk will also give an overview of the ongoing research in the field.

Prof. Mehwish Alam

Mehwish Alam is an Associate Professor and is leading a research group in Neurosymbolic Artificial Intelligence at Télécom Paris, Institut Polytechnique de Paris, France. Her research topics include Language Models, Natural Language Processing, Graph Learning, Machine/Deep Learning, and Knowledge Graphs. More specifically her research group focuses on the topics such as knowledge based hallucination detection in language models, learning representation from hyper and dynamic graphs, cognitive aspects of language models, explainability, and the application domains such as biomedicine and cultural heritages.

Her research work has been published in high ranking conferences such as IJCAI, SIGIR, CIKM, ISWC, ECAI, and LREC. She has also published in prestigious journals such as Knowledge Based Systems, IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine, Social Network Analysis and Mining, Scientometrics, Progress in Artificial Intelligence, and Semantic Web Journal.

Prof. Mehwish Alam is part of the team leading the development of YAGO Knowledge Graph. She is currently leading academic and industrial collaborations on various aspects on the intersection of LLMs and Knowledge Graphs. She has been a part of the Organization Committee of various conferences in the field of Semantic Web and is a Senior PC member in ECAI and LREC/COLING.