Avi Sil           

Work Experience: [ CV ]

• Team lead, Question Answering, IBM, 2019 - Present
• NLP Chair, IBM, 2017 - present
• Research Scientist, IBM, 2014 - present
• Research Intern, Microsoft Research, Summer 2013
• Data & Tech Analyst Intern, Morgan Stanley, Summer 2011

Chair:

• Organizer:
  • Question Answering and Semantic Parsing Workshop, AI Research Week, MIT 2019
  • ACL Workshop on Relevance of Linguistic Structure in Neural NLP, 2018
• Track Coordinator
  • Entity Discovery and Linking task at Text Analysis Conference (TAC), 2019 (along with Heng Ji)
• Area Chair (Tracks: Question Answering & Information Extraction)
  • 2020: ACL, EMNLP
  • 2019: CoNLL, ACL, NAACL
  • 2018: NAACL, COLING
• Session Chair
  • ACL 2019, Question Answering 
  • NAACL 2018, Question Answering

About him: 
Dr. Avi Sil is a Research Scientist and a Team Lead in the Multilingual NLP group at IBM Research AI. He leads the Question Answering team (comprising of Machine Learning scientists and engineers) and is one of the creators of the GAAMA system. His team works on cutting edge research on industry scale NLP and Deep Learning algorithms. He is also the Chair of the NLP professional community of IBM.

His research also includes  Information Extraction: entity recognition and linking and relation extraction. He co-leads the TAC KBP track for Entity Discovery and Linking (EDL) along with Dr. Heng Ji. He is a senior program committee member for major Computational Linguistics conferences including being an Area Chair several times. His entity linking system has been the top system several years on TAC KBP evaluations by NIST. He has more than 12 US patents filed all in the area of Artificial Intelligence and it's applications in various spheres.

Avi finished his PhD in Computer Science under the supervision of his thesis advisor Alexander Yates. He also worked on Temporal Information Extraction in the Machine Learning Group at Microsoft Research, Redmond managed by Chris Burges and John Platt. His mentor was Silviu Cucerzan. 

Latest News:

1. (new) Going to collaborate with Prof. Mohit Iyyer (IBM Faculty Award 2020) on Long Form QA.
2. (new) Entity Discovery and Linking for TAC 2019 (along with Heng Ji) is available here
3. Two papers accepted at EMNLP 2019
4. Organizing a Question Answering and Semantic Parsing workshop at the IBM Research Week.
5. Our QA system GAAMA is at Rank 1 (short answers) on the Google Natural Questions challenge. (6/14/19)

Research Interests: