Congratulations to Shadi Manafi!

Congratulations to Dr. Shadi Manafi for successfully defending her Ph.D. dissertation!

In Shadi’s dissertation, Smart Transfers: Challenges and Opportunities in Boosting Low-Resource Language Models with High-Resource Power, she examines the properties of transformer language models trained on well-resourced or high-resource languages (HRLs) when applied to low-resource languages (LRLs) and finds that language models can come to depend to an extent on word memorization of the better-resourced languages, a shortcoming that comes with some unexpected drawbacks and (surprisingly) benefits.

Congratulations to Shadi! You were the first Ph.D. student I started working with at CSU and congratulations on navigating this convoluted and sometimes challenging path successfully. Best of luck in what comes next!

Here is a picture after defense, of Shadi with her committee members: Prof. Francisco Ortega (CS) and Prof. Edwin Chong (Electrical and Computer Engineering). And me (not shown, Prof. Nathaniel Blanchard, who attended online).

(X-posted on nikhilkrishnaswamy.com)