| Abstract |
The vision of my FLF fellowship was to offer a bridge between AI theory and practice when it comes to language technologies. The last few years during the fellowship have been paramount to the progress of the field. The general public are becoming more familiar with language technology (e.g. through applications such as ChatGPT) and are increasingly aware of what it can offer. To this end, the first years of the FLF are contributing to shaping this landscape, in particular in relation to the development of efficient and practical models. For the next three years, I will focus on the practical and multi-disciplinary components that the initial research has contributed to, while also reinforcing and extending the foundational research behind this progress. Natural Language Processing (NLP) as a discipline is constantly evolving, rapidly so especially in the last few years. This speed brings about potential risks but also opportunities to harness these advances to put and bring them to provide social good. My vision takes a positive view on this technology and the opportunities that it can bring to many important disciplines, including, but not limited to, health and environment. Data, and in particular textual data, is constantly growing in all disciplines, and makes it impossible for humans to process and get insights from them. Here is where NLP comes into play, but nowadays only experts with access to expensive computing resources (usually large corporations) can take advantage of the exponential progress in the field. The vision of my fellowship is aimed at facilitating the access of NLP technology to non-expert users, including (but not exclusively) researchers from other disciplines, industry and public bodies for positive benefit. This can be achieved by researching efficient methods, better understanding the strengths and limitations of these models, and by releasing open data and specialised models. To fulfil this vision, the renewal of the FLF will allow me and my team to continue to develop the research, keep pace with the rapid evolution of the field, allow us to continue the work started and offer the space to explore exciting new collaborations and applications. Crucially, the practical and multi-disciplinary nature of the scheme, coupled with the strong research foundations required to achieve these goals, make the FLF scheme unique in helping achieve these goals. |