Alkiviadis Katsalis, a PhD student in Natural Language Generation, studying at the International Hellenic University in Greece, working with Prof. Konstantinos Diamantaras, visited the University of Alicante in Spain. There he conducted research under supervision of Prof. Elena Lloret Pastor. His research was focused on integrating and detecting commonsense knowledge, which is also subject area of his PhD work. This work was fully in line with the objectives of the COST action, which covers text generation and multilinguality. He also collaborated with the GPLSI research group from the University of Alicante, whose knowledge and assistance was extremely valuable to achieving goals of the visit. Specifically, during the visit, Alkiviadis studied the implementation of commonsense knowledge tools, such as KGBART and COMET, for generating new commonsense knowledge. A major outcome of this STSM is the ability to apply such knowledge to any downstream NLG task, such as QA, abstractive text summarization, etc. The next step in this research collaboration will be to tweak some existing methods, such as retrieval augmented generators, by adding commonsense knowledge where COMET and KGBART could be helpful. Collaboration with the host university will continue by scheduling frequent calls, discussing ideas and publications in this area will be pursued.
Multi-task, Multilingual, Multi-modal Language Generation
