[Somean] Socio relevant CSE talk

[Campbell-Kibler, Kathryn]

Most of you will have gotten this, but you might not have scrolled down. Talk is titled “Title: Dialect as a Site of Bias: Probing Covert Racism in Language Models”.

-K

From: Lingosu <lingosu-bounces+kbck=ling.ohio-state.edu at lists.osu.edu> on behalf of Kumar, Sachin via Lingosu <lingosu at lists.osu.edu>
Date: Thursday, April 3, 2025 at 3:57 PM
To: lingosu at lists.osu.edu <lingosu at lists.osu.edu>
Subject: [Lingosu] Fw: Guest Speaker Valentin Hofmann
Hi everyone,

I am a faculty member of CSE and hosting a speaker, Valentin Hofmann, on April 16. Please see the details below. If you would like to meet the speaker, please sign up using the link below.

Thank you,
Sachin

________________________________
From: Cse-faculty on behalf of Antoine, Nodie via Cse-faculty
Sent: Thursday, April 3, 2025 12:50 PM
To: cse-faculty at lists.osu.edu; cse-staff at lists.osu.edu; cse-researchstaff at lists.osu.edu; Cse-grads at lists.osu.edu; cse-ptlecs at lists.osu.edu
Subject: [Cse-faculty] Guest Speaker Valentin Hofmann


Hi Everyone,



We have a guest speaker named Valentin Hofmann, with University of Washington and Ai2 coming on April 16th. Hosted by Sachin Kumar. Please see more information below about date, time and room location. Thanks.





Title: Dialect as a Site of Bias: Probing Covert Racism in Language Models



Speaker: Valentin Hofmann, University of Washington and Ai2



Date: April 16, 1pm

Location: DL 480

Remote Zoom Link: https://go.osu.edu/valentin-hofmann-talk

Meeting Sign Up Link: https://go.osu.edu/valentin-hofmann-meet

Website: https://valentinhofmann.github.io/<https://urldefense.com/v3/__https:/valentinhofmann.github.io/__;!!KGKeukY!y47bJzUiEv8M7LdkAJlLCOuBttCLO2ZpSQVSvWmZQM1QnLrnNzGAcj9kpEG0lEF6Kr-N1Ce6JRgalPwI1pTTwBtd9AyPBw$>



Abstract: Language models are known to perpetuate systematic racial prejudices, making their judgments biased in problematic ways about groups like African Americans. While prior research has focused on overt racism in language models, social scientists have argued that racism with a more subtle character has developed over time. It is unknown whether this covert racism manifests in language models.

In this talk, I will present recent research showing that language models embody covert racism in the form of dialect prejudice: they exhibit raciolinguistic stereotypes about speakers of African American English that are more negative than any human stereotypes about African Americans ever experimentally recorded. I will talk about how these covert stereotypes are related to the attitudes that language models overtly display about African Americans, what harmful consequences they can have, and whether they are addressed by existing methods for alleviating racial bias in language models such as human feedback training. Finally, I will discuss how dialect prejudice affects the reasoning capabilities of language models.



Bio: Valentin Hofmann is a postdoc at the Allen Institute for AI and the University of Washington. His work broadly focuses on the intersection of NLP, linguistics, and computational social science, with specific interests in tokenization and socially aware language models. Previously, he was a PhD student at the University of Oxford and a research assistant at LMU Munich. During his PhD, he also spent time as a research intern at DeepMind and as a visiting scholar at Stanford University.



Thanks,

Nodie Antoine
Administrative Assistant
Monday-Friday 8:00am-4:30pm

The Ohio State University
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
395 Dreese Lab
2015 Neil Ave, Columbus , OH 43210
614-292-1878 Ofiice
Antoine.28 at osu.edu<mailto:Antoine.28 at osu.edu>

[The Ohio State University]


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