Contextual Modeling for Language and Vision with Nasrin Mostafazadeh

Today we're joined by Nasrin Mostafazadeh, Senior AI Research Scientist at New York-based Elemental Cognition. Our conversation focuses on Nasrin's work in event-centric contextual modeling in language and vision, which she sees as a means of giving AI systems a bit of "common sense." We discuss Nasrin's work on the Story Cloze Test, which is a reasoning framework for evaluating story understanding and generation. We explore the details of this task--including what constitutes a "story"--and some of the challenges it presents and approaches for solving it. We also discuss how you model what a computer understands, building semantic representation algorithms, different ways to approach "explainability," and multimodal extensions to her contextual modeling work.