Avi Sil           

About him: 
Dr. Avi Sil is a Principal Research Scientist and a Research Manager in the Multilingual NLP group at IBM Research AI. He has more than 10 years of experience in the field of AI and considered a global leader in the field of Question Answering. He leads the Multilingual Question Answering team (comprising of research scientists and engineers) and is one of the creators of the GAAMA system. His team's research has not only become products but also featured at the top of multiple leaderboards (Natural Questions, TyDI, XOR-TyDI). He is also the Chair of the NLP professional community of IBM.

He is a senior program committee member for major Computational Linguistics conferences including being an Area Chair several times. He has more than 12 US patents filed all in the area of Artificial Intelligence and it's applications in various spheres.

Work Experience: [ CV ]

• Research Manager, IBM, Jun 2021 - Present
• Principal Research Scientist, IBM, May 2021 - Present
• Team lead, Question Answering + Information Retrieval, IBM, Jan 2019 - Jun 2021
• NLP Chair, IBM, 2017 - present
• Research Scientist, IBM, May 2014 - May 2021
• Research Intern, Microsoft Research, Summer 2013
• Data & Tech Analyst Intern, Morgan Stanley, Summer 2011

Research Interests: 

• Question Answering
• Information Retrieval
• Low-resource NLP
• Large language models and representation learning

Chair:

• Demo Chair:
  • NAACL 2021
• Diversity and Inclusion Chair:
  • Chair of the Academic Inclusion team at ACL 2021
• Organizer:
  • Question Answering and Semantic Parsing Workshop, AI Research Week, MIT 2019
  • ACL Workshop on Relevance of Linguistic Structure in Neural NLP, 2018
• Shared Task Coordinator
  • 2020: Fine grained entity extraction at Text Analysis Conference (TAC), (co lead along with Heng Ji)
  • 2019: Entity Discovery and Linking task at Text Analysis Conference (TAC), (co lead 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

Latest News:

1. (new) Invited guest lecture at GA Tech NLP course. Slides are available here.
2. (new) Gave a tutorial at EMNLP 2021 Multilingual Multi-domain QA along with Sebastian Ruder. Slides are here.
3. Two papers at ACL 2021 (on QA and IE) and 1 at SIGIR 2021 (Neural IR for Domain Adaptation)
4.  Two papers at NAACL 2021. 1. QA over tables and 2. Event time extraction
5. Two papers at AAAI 2021.
6. Invited talk at UCLA NLP Group (Nov 20). Host: Kai-wei Chang