Portrait of Timothy O'Donnell

Timothy O'Donnell

Core Academic Member
odonnelt@mila.quebec
Canada CIFAR AI Chair
Assistant Professor, McGill University, Department of Linguistics
Research Topics
Information Theory
Natural Language Processing
Probabilistic Models
Website

Biography

I am an assistant professor in the Department of Linguistics at McGill University.

In my research, I develop mathematical models of language generalization, learning and processing. My research draws on experimental methods from psychology, formal modelling techniques from natural language processing, theoretical tools from linguistics, and problems in all three of these areas.

Current Students

Amanda Doucette
PhD - McGill University
Benjamin LeBrun
Collaborating Alumni - McGill University
Website
Github
Google Scholar

Publications

Recursive Top-Down Production for Sentence Generation with Latent Trees
Shawn Tan
Yikang Shen
Timothy O'Donnell
Alessandro Sordoni
Aaron Courville
2020-11-01
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020 (published)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Exploiting Syntactic Structure for Better Language Modeling: A Syntactic Distance Approach
Wenyu Du
Zhouhan Lin
Yikang Shen
Timothy O'Donnell
Yoshua Bengio
Yue Sara Zhang
It is commonly believed that knowledge of syntactic structure should improve language modeling. However, effectively and computationally eff… (see more)iciently incorporating syntactic structure into neural language models has been a challenging topic. In this paper, we make use of a multi-task objective, i.e., the models simultaneously predict words as well as ground truth parse trees in a form called “syntactic distances”, where information between these two separate objectives shares the same intermediate representation. Experimental results on the Penn Treebank and Chinese Treebank datasets show that when ground truth parse trees are provided as additional training signals, the model is able to achieve lower perplexity and induce trees with better quality.
2020-07-01
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (published)
doi.org
arxiv.org
CLOSURE: Assessing Systematic Generalization of CLEVR Models
Dzmitry Bahdanau
Harm de Vries
Timothy O'Donnell
Shikhar Murty
Philippe Beaudoin
Yoshua Bengio
Aaron Courville
2019-12-12
ArXiv (preprint)
arxiv.org
arxiv.org