Benno Krojer

CV (May 2022)

I'm a PhD student in AI/NLP at MILA & McGill in Montreal with Siva Reddy, focusing on language grounding.

My research interests in the space of language grounding roughly are:

approaches inspired from cognitive science/child-learning: language emergence and acquisition, theory of mind, curriculum learning, human-in-the-loop/learning from interaction...
persistent (embodied) agents
grounded models for text-only NLP tasks
pragmatics/dialogue

Here is a mindmap version of my research interests from spring of 2021. Note: I have not directly worked on the majority of these topics yet!

I also have a personal life on this site such as philosophy or personal reflections.

I did my BSc in Computational Linguistics with a Minor in Computer Science from LMU Munich where I worked on Symbolic Reasoning in Transformers and Coreference Resolution in Machine Translation.

At the end of my BSc I thought "language grounding sounds amazing" which led to "let's do a PhD in it". Feel free to check out my recent blog post about my motivation for language grounding, and this amazing paper which was my original inspiration: Experience Grounds Language. Also, here is a story of how I ended up going for a PhD.

During, and in the year after my BSc, I worked at different startups/small companies (Helsing, Micropsi Industries, Lilt, Intrafind) and as a research intern at MILA.

I play Ultimate Frisbee. My personal highlight: representing Germany at the U24 World Championships in 2019 → video.

I like philosophy and found a way to share my passion for it through PhilosophiaMunich, a philosophy society I co-founded in 2019.

1 year of my Bachelor was spent at Trinity College Dublin as an Erasmus Exchange student. Lots of new friendships!

Publications

Image Retrieval from Contextual Descriptions Benno Krojer, Vaibhav Adlakha, Vibhav Vineet, Yash Goyal, Edoardo Ponti, Siva Reddy. Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2022.
Are Pretrained Language Models Symbolic Reasoners Over Knowledge? Nora Kassner*, Benno Krojer*, Hinrich Schütze. Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL), 2020.
ContraCAT: Contrastive Coreference Analytical Templates for Machine Translation Dario Stojanovski*, Benno Krojer*, Denis Peskov*, Alexander Fraser. Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING), 2020.

(*equal contribution)

Interested in staying up-to-date with language grounding? Follow my twitter list containing most researchers in this field that are on twitter: NLP: Grounded Language