Alane Suhr


Assistant Professor
Berkeley EECS / BAIR

8052 Berkeley Way West
2121 Berkeley Way
Berkeley, CA 94704

publications Berkeley NLP
A random picture either of me or that I took.


About

Hi! I'm Alane Suhr (/əˈleɪn ˈsuəɹ/), an Assistant Professor at UC Berkeley EECS.

In 2022, I received my PhD in Computer Science at Cornell University, based at Cornell Tech in New York, NY, and advised by Yoav Artzi. Afterwards, I spent about a year in Seattle, WA at AI2 as a Young Investigator on the Mosaic team (led by Yejin Choi). In 2016, I graduated from Ohio State University with a BS in Computer Science and Engineering and a minor in Linguistics.

My research spans natural language processing, machine learning, and computer vision. I build systems that use language to interact with people, e.g., in collaborative interactions (like CerealBar). I design models and datasets that address and represent problems in language grounding (e.g., NLVR). I also develop learning algorithms for systems that learn language through interaction.

My email address is suhr@berkeley.edu. Before cold-emailing me, please check if your question is frequently asked. I don't have the bandwidth to reply to every email I receive, so if the answer to your question is on this page, I will not be able to reply individually.

In Fall 2023, I'm co-teaching CS 288 (Tuesdays and Thursdays, 11-12:30 in Morgan 101) with Dan Klein.

Berkeley EECS PhD Admissions 2024

I will be recruiting ~2 students to the Berkeley EECS PhD program for Autumn 2024 matriculation. I am particularly excited about research at the intersections of cognitive science, psycholinguistics, and natural language processing, with a focus on language use and acquisition in situated interactions. Due to the volume of emails I receive, I won't be able to respond to individual emails about admissions.

Undergraduate Research Opportunities

Starting early 2024, I plan to begin recruiting Berkeley undergraduate researchers to work on existing projects in the lab. I currently cannot respond to any individual emails about undergrad research, but keep an eye out for updates about this.

Course Announcement (Spring 2024):
CS 294-258, Language Agents in Interaction

In Spring 2024 I am leading a small special topics course (294-258) titled "Language Agents in Interaction". The course will be centered around (a) reading and discussing foundational work in (psycho)linguistics, cognitive science, information science, and computer science; and (b) a course project.

Course topics will include: language and knowledge, discourse and situated dialogue, language acquisition and change, computational semantics and pragmatics, human-agent interaction, dialogue systems, and multimodal language agents (including computer vision, vision and language, robotics, reinforcement learning, etc.).

Currently enrollment is limited to EECS PhD students. If you are a current Berkeley student interested in enrolling, please fill this form!

About the title: In this course, a language agent is some agent (either human or automated) that uses language (i.e., generates or understands utterances in the context of an interaction).

Note: The course topics will be roughly orthogonal to recent advancements in NLP (including LLMs, etc.). While we will certainly discuss these technologies, the course will not be limited to recent language technology only, and discussions will be held from the variety of perspectives the course is intended to introduce (e.g., from the perspective of child language acquisition). We will only minimally or inadvertently discuss technical details (e.g., architectures, prompting methods) of modern approaches.

News and Events
2023
December 11 - 15 Attending NeurIPS. Spotlight posters on December 12 (Wu and Hu et al.) and December 14 (Suhr and Artzi)! New Orleans, LA
2024
March 29 Invited talk at OSU Linguistics Columbus, OH
April 4 Guest speaker at Stanford NLP seminar Stanford, CA
August ? Co-organizing ACL workshop: Wordplay: When Language Meets Games Bangkok, Thailand
(hybrid)
2023
November 17 Invited talk at SoCalNLP Los Angeles, CA
October 2 Invited talk at ICCV workshop on Closing the Loop between Vision and Language (CLVL) virtual
July 28 Co-organized ICML workshop: TOM: Theory of Mind in Communicating Agents Honolulu, Hawaiʻi
(hybrid)
July 20 Panelist on the Language Seminar for the CogSci workshop: How does the mind discover useful abstractions? (recording) virtual
June 19 Invited talk at CVPR Workshop on Open-Domain Reasoning Under Multi-Modal Settings (O-DRUM) Vancouver, BC
April 20 Guest lecture at CMU 11-777 virtual
April 13 Guest lecture at UT Austin CS 378 virtual
March 3 Guest lecture at UW CS 447 virtual
2022
December 15 Invited talk at CoRL Workshop on Language and Robot Learning virtual
December 2 Co-organizing NeurIPS Workshop: InterNLP: Interactive Learning for NLP New Orleans, LA
(hybrid)
October 23 Invited talk at ECCV Workshop on Language for 3D Scenes virtual
October 21 Guest speaker at UW Computational Linguistics Lab virtual
September 9 Invited talk at BAIR Trust, Equity, and Grounded Language Workshop virtual
August 22 Dissertation defense (recording) New York, NY
July 15 Invited talk at NAACL Workshop on Multimodal Artificial Intelligence Seattle, WA
July 14 Invited talk at SemEval Seattle, WA
May 4 Job talk at AI2 virtual
May 2 Job talk at UT Austin CS Austin, TX
April 28 Job talk at HuggingFace New York, NY
April 17 Job talk at Microsoft Research virtual
April 11 Job talk at CMU LTI Pittsburgh, PA
April 7 Job talk at University of Waterloo CS virtual
April 5 Job talk at GATech School of IC virtual
April 4 Job talk at Boston University CS virtual
March 30 Job talk at Northwestern CS virtual
March 29 Job talk at UChicago Data Science virtual
March 23 Job talk at UPenn CIS Philadelphia, PA
March 22 Job talk at Rutgers CS virtual
March 17 Job talk at Yale CS virtual
March 14 Job talk at JHU CS virtual
March 8 Job talk at UC Berkeley CS virtual
March 2 Job talk at TTIC Chicago, IL
February 28 Job talk at SFU CS virtual
February 24 Guest speaker at Stanford NLP seminar virtual
February 23 Job talk at UMass Amherst CICS virtual
February 9 Presented Effenberger et al. 2022 at SCiL virtual
January 20 Guest speaker at NRL Reasoning Lunch virtual
2021
December 9 Guest speaker at Cornell CS Colloquium Ithaca, NY
November 17 Guest speaker at NLP with Friends (recording) virtual
November 20 Tutorial at EMNLP, Crowdsourcing Beyond Annotation: Case Studies in Benchmark Data Collection (recordings) virtual
June 10 Co-organizing NAACL Workshop: VIGIL: Visually Grounded Interaction and Language virtual
May 21 Guest speaker at DeepMind NLP reading group virtual