CS@CU Distinguished Lecture Series

Heng Ji, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

SmartBook: an AI Prophetess for Disaster Reporting and Forecasting 

Abstract: 

We propose SmartBook, a novel framework that cannot be solved by ChatGPT, targeting situation report generation which consumes large volumes of news data to produce a structured situation report with multiple hypotheses (claims) summarized and grounded with rich links to factual evidence by claim detection, fact-checking, misinformation detection and factual error correction. 

Furthermore, SmartBook can also serve as a novel news event simulator, or an intelligent prophetess.  Given “What-if” conditions and dimensions elicited from a domain expert user concerning a disaster scenario, SmartBook will induce schemas from historical events, and automatically generate a complex event graph along with a timeline of news articles that describe new simulated events based on a new Λ-shaped attention mask that can generate text with infinite length. By effectively simulating disaster scenarios in both event graph and natural language format, we expect SmartBook will greatly assist humanitarian workers and policymakers to exercise reality checks (what would the next disaster look like under these given conditions?), and thus better prevent and respond to future disasters. 

Bio: 
Heng Ji is a professor at Computer Science Department and an affiliated faculty member at the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and Coordinated Science Laboratory of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She is an Amazon Scholar. She is the Founding Director of the Amazon-Illinois Center on AI for Interactive Conversational Experiences (AICE). She received her B.A. and M.A. in Computational Linguistics from Tsinghua University and her M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from New York University. Her research interests focus on Natural Language Processing, especially on Multimedia Multilingual Information Extraction, Knowledge-enhanced Large Language Models, Knowledge-driven Generation, and Conversational AI.