Hello! I'm Ben Newman, a current senior at Stanford studying Computer Science working with the Stanford NLP group and the Stanford Internet Observatory. My interests include in computer science, cognitive science, linguistics, education, and misinformation.
I'm interested in understanding how NLP systems learn and process language and the role that our systems play in society at large. I've worked on projects analyzing models' abilities to extrapolate, evaluating their ability to communicate, and tracking misinformation in the run-up to the 2020 election. At Stanford Splash I co-teach courses in Introductory Linguistics and Computing Fundamentals.
The EOS Decision and Length Extrapolation
Benjamin Newman, John Hewitt, Percy Liang and Chris Manning
Blackbox NLP@EMNLP 2020 (Outstanding Paper)
Why do sequence models struggle to extrapolate? For many reasons, but the decision to train models with End of Sequence tokens at the end of training examples is one of them. We investigate and visualize the effect that this decision has on neural models' extrapolative abilities.
Communication-based Evaluation for Natural Language Generation
Benjamin Newman, Reuben Cohn-Gordon, and Christopher Potts
Society for Computation in Linguistics@LSA 2020
Do n-gram overlap metrics like BLEU capture whether the models are successful communicators? Not really, so we created our own way of evaluating communicative effectiveness based on the Rational Speech Acts framework.
Conducted during CS224U and the Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI) summer internship.
Representations from pretrained language models likely incorporate syntax, but can we access it without training supervised probes? [pdf]
CS229: Machine Learning. Final Project (2019).
What's your name in Chinese? Name translations differ from standard MT as they are based in phoenetics and lack large corpera. We explore two approaches here. [pdf] [code]
CS221: Artificial Intelligence: Principles and Techniques: Final Project with Julia Gong (2018).
How can you teach computational agents to follow directions without defining what each instruction means? POMDPs! [pdf] [code]
CS238: Decision Making under Uncertainty: Final Project with Suvir Mirchandani and Levi Lian (2018)
What we can learn about people's use of swears by looking at their word2vec and GLOVE embeddings? [pdf]
Linguist 130A: Semantics and Pragmatics: Final Project with Julia Gong (2018)
Hiding secret messages in HTML zero-width space characters. Demo here!
blnewman@stanford.edu