Anna Rogers 🇺🇦🇪🇺 Profile picture
Assistant professor @CPH_SODAS: interpretability, representation learning, AI & society. Co-program chair #ACL2023. Mastodon: @annargrs@sigmoid.social
Feb 28, 2022 21 tweets 8 min read
Dear tech & ethics people: I've done some research on Roskomnadzor: the "ministry of truth" that created the alternative propaganda reality most Russians seem to inhabit. Some truly fascinating stuff. Here's what I learned 🧵
As always, comments/corrections welcome. /1 The most obvious thing Roskomnadzor does is direct censoriship. E.g. if a blog publshes a story Putin doesn't like, Roskomnadzor requires its removal. A popular reason is "extremism", which applied to e.g. Navalny investigations of corrupt officials. /2
osce.usmission.gov/on-media-freed…
Feb 28, 2022 6 tweets 2 min read
🇺🇦 update: Kyiv and the big cities are also still controlled by Ukraine. Russians did take Berdyansk, but they do NOT control the Zaporizhzha nuclear power plant, as they claimed this morning. /1 Judging by the amount of threads by strategy/military experts, we now have two big questions: (a) why on earth is Putin doing this, (b) why are they failing so badly. /2
Feb 27, 2022 6 tweets 3 min read
😱Putin puts his nuclear forces on "high alert"!

His stated motivation in this vid is not that 🇺🇦 kicks his army's ass, but that the West takes "unfriendly" steps (sanctions), and there are "aggressive statements" from the top officials. Who exactly is he threatening? /1 In case you missed it: Russians already increased radiation level bc they stirred radioactive soil while rolling tanks through Chernobyl. They also hit a nuclear facility in Kyiv (thank god no leaks). And 2 energy facilities exploded (oil & gas). /2
Feb 27, 2022 6 tweets 2 min read
Your daily reminder: what the West now does for Ukraine is important not just for 🇺🇦 Ukraine, but as a precedent. Very few other conflicts have received equal attention from the West in the past, and that's horrible. /1 As a matter of fact, not even Ukraine itself has ever received this much attention, even though the exact same war has been going on since 2014. Thousands died, millions were displaced in the heart of Europe, the Ukrainians were as white and as competent - and nobody cared. /2
Feb 27, 2022 4 tweets 2 min read
🇺🇦 update: lots of great news this morning!
* Kyiv is stil standing. As a matter of fact, the mighty Russian army still isn't holding ANY large city in Ukraine, which is getting embarassing.
/1
* US starts a dedicated task force to hunt oligarch money and stop "golden passports"!!!!! /2
Feb 27, 2022 5 tweets 2 min read
🇺🇦status update: Russia gets cut off from SWIFT! It's only for "some" banks🤔, but I'm very happy to see that EU is capable of moving fast, in principle. Also Germany is finally supplying Ukraine with weapons (and many other countries do that too) /1 The bad news is that there will be more heavy fighting for Kyiv this night. If Russians don't take it, it'll start to just look really bad for them professionally. So they'll probably go all in. They already hit an oil terminal in Vasylkiv😢/2
Feb 26, 2022 30 tweets 13 min read
📢 tech & ethics folks: I've collected 🧵 of pointers to official statements and discussions on what the big tech has done/should do for 🇺🇦 war. Again, this is not just about 🇺🇦: what we do now sets precedent for the future. Comments, updates & corrections welcome!
/1
🏅 @meta stopped monetizing or selling ads to Russian state media:

/2
Feb 26, 2022 4 tweets 2 min read
🇺🇦 update: Kyiv has not fallen! The #GloryToUkraine motto is certainly holding up. Ukrainian sources say that they have received NLAWs, and are expecting anti-air defence units. Fun fact: the mayor of Kyiv is Klitchko - a former boxer champion. /1
edition.cnn.com/2022/02/25/spo… It's hard to tell which casualty reports are accurate, but Russia doesn't seem to have officially admitted to any casualties on their side so far, which definitely can't be the case. It's also not the case that no civilian buildings are getting hit 😢. /2
Feb 25, 2022 9 tweets 4 min read
🇺🇦 update: Ukrainian army is still standing - which is great news. Generally, the longer they manage to repel the initial attacks, the more the Russians are losing the blitzkrieg advantage. And the worse it looks for them internally and externally.
/1
🙏 Today is critical: Russians are trying to take the capital, as they did in Georgia. But Kyiv+suburbs is much larger & denser than Tbilisi, so it'll be harder. Also Ukrainians have high morale, better weapons... and Russians kindly trained them for 8 years. Fingers crossed.
/2
Feb 24, 2022 7 tweets 3 min read
How can you help🇺🇦? 4 ways:
1) Donate (links I checked myself in this🧵)
2) Bug your representatives for sanctions & aid
3) Information hygiene: great guide by @katestarbird
4) It's not "Ukraine crisis" or "operation". It's "war/invasion".
/1 Donations to Ukrainian army - a special multi-currency account set up by the National Bank of Ukraine itself!
bank.gov.ua/en/news/all/na…
/2
Nov 10, 2021 10 tweets 5 min read
A few highlights from @nlpnoah's talk at insights-workshop.github.io:

@nlpnoah: NLP research and practice ask fundamentally different questions
/1 @nlpnoah: NLP practice asks whether X improves the outcome. NLP research tries to fill in the gaps in the knowledge map.
/2
Nov 9, 2021 11 tweets 5 min read
#EMNLP2021 ends, but the Insights for Negative Results are coming tomorrow! The workshop is hybrid: virtual posters, talks by/for a mix of on-site & online speakers & attendees. Hosts: @JoaoSedoc @shabnamt1 @arumshisky @annargrs

Really proud of the program this year🧵: 8:45 Opening remarks
9:00 🗣️ Invited talk by Bonnie Webber: The Reviewers & the Reviewed: Institutional Memory & Institutional Incentives Image
Nov 9, 2021 4 tweets 3 min read
A highlight from #EMNLP2021 fascinating keynote by @StevenBird:
NLP often comes with a set of assumptions about what are the needs of communities with low-resource languages. But we need to learn what they *actually* need, they may have a completely different epistemology.
/1 Image AR: this is such a thought-provoking talk, pointing at the missing bridges between language tech and social sciences, esp. anthropology. As a computational linguist lucky to spend a year in @CPH_SODAS - I still don't think I even see the depth of everything we're missing.
/2
May 4, 2021 18 tweets 8 min read
Tired of paper pdfs? Brainstorm with us about the future of research communication at @rethinkmlpapers (@iclr_conf Friday)!
Talks & panel by David Ha, Terrence Parr @evelynevs @FalaahArifKhan @Hugo_larochelle @jeffbigham @lillian_weng @deviparikh

🧵 Some ideas from the program:
May 1, 2021 4 tweets 2 min read
🤦‍♀️ The only good thing about this is how much attention it attracted, so hopefully @icmlconf would reconsider.
/1 It can't even work, since peer review is only reliable for the clearly bad papers. Decisions on borderline papers are as good as random. This won't "raise the bar", it'll only reinforce the AC/SAC preferences. And likely improve the chances for preprinted papers by famous ppl.
/2
Oct 9, 2020 8 tweets 4 min read
New paper📜: What Can We Do to Improve Peer Review in NLP?
arxiv.org/abs/2010.03863
with @IAugenstein

TLDR: In its current form, peer review is a poorly defined task with apples-to-oranges comparisons and unrealistic expectations. /1 Image Reviewers resort to heuristics such as reject-if-not-SOTA to cope with uncertainty, so the only way to change that is to reduce uncertainty. Which is at least partly doable: better paper-reviewer matching, unambiguous eval criteria, fine-grained tracks, better review forms etc /2
Aug 30, 2020 10 tweets 3 min read
Preprint anonymity debate continues!

TLDR for those who missed the prior discussion: non-anonymous preprints systematically disadvantage the unknown labs and/or underrepresented communities.
My previous post: hackingsemantics.xyz/2020/anonymity/ /1 A new post by @ducha_aiki and @amy_tabb argues that fairness comes at a steep opportunity cost for the small labs. Full text here: amytabb.com/ts/2020_08_21/
/2
Jul 3, 2020 25 tweets 41 min read
#NLProc #metatweet for @emnlp2020 workshops! Check it out:

* if you missed @coling2020 deadline😉
* if you have any questions: we linked to announcement threads!
* to find folks to follow in your field: we tried to tag all the organizers!

Joint effort with @fblain. 1. Conference on Machine Translation (#wmt20)
statmt.org/wmt20/
Organisers: @bazril @OndrejBojar @cfedermann @c_monz @loicbarrault @mjpost @Turchi_Marco
Deadline: August 15, 2020 (research papers)

#NlProc
Jun 13, 2020 9 tweets 3 min read
I really enjoyed this episode of #nlphighlights with @earnmyturns. It is about managing industry research teams, but also generally about incentives in research and the need for intellectual diversity.

soundcloud.com/nlp-highlights…

A few highlights from the highlights: /1 If hiring decisions are guided by the number of ACL/NeurIPS papers, you will hire essentially the same person over and over again: probably CS background, from a top US school, white, male, with the means to ignore everything for the sake of *ACL deadlines for a few years. /2