About
I am Alexandra, a Research Scientist at Google in the Bard team working on Natural Language Processing (Machine Learning).
Before that, I was a PhD student at the University of Munich supervised by Alex Fraser. My PhD research was mostly on combining information from various languages and domains to enable positive transfer during parameter-efficient fine-tuning of language models, especially under resource constraints.
During my PhD, I interned at Google DeepΜind in Berlin, hosted by Sebastian Ruder and Priyanka Agrawal. Prior to that, I interned (twice) at the Allen Institute for AI with Jesse Dodge and Matt Peters; I was part of the AllenNLP team. I also spent 4 months at Amazon AI in Santa Clara, CA , working with Brian Thompson, Prashant Mathur and Marcello Federico as an intern in the AI human language technology group.
Before starting the PhD, I graduated with a diploma (Bachelor and MEng) in Electrical & Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA).
News
January 2024: Excited to share that I have joined Google Bard in NYC as a Research Scientist!
November 2023: New preprint is out on Language and Task Arithmetic with Parameter-Efficient Layers for Zero-Shot Summarization from my internship at Google DeepMind!
October 2023: Happy to share that our paper Mitigating Data Imbalance and Representation Degeneration in Multilingual Machine Translation has been accepted to the Findings of EMNLP 2023!
May 2023: Our paper Mitigating Data Imbalance and Representation Degeneration in Multilingual Machine Translation is out.
May 2023: Our paper On the Copying Problem of Unsupervised NMT: A Training Schedule with a Language Discriminator Loss was accepted to IWSLT 2023 and our paper Improving Isochronous Machine Translation with Target Factors and Auxiliary Counters (from my Amazon internship) was accepted to Interspeech 2023!
May 2023: Jesse gave a talk at the LTI CMU Colloquium, discussing our recent papers on efficient domain adaptation of pretrained language models (1, 2); you can check it out here.
April 2023: Very happy to start a research internship in Google Berlin, as part of Google DeepMind!
March 2023: Our paper Language-Family Adapters for Low-Resource Multilingual NMT was accepted to LoResMT, EACL 2023!
February 2023: Check out or work on Isochronous Automatic Dubbing (from my internship at Amazon last fall)!
February 2023: I am co-organizing a shared task on dubbing in IWSLT 2023 (co-located with ACL next summer) along with former teammates from Amazon.
January 2023: Our paper AdapterSoup: Weight Averaging to Improve Generalization of Pretrained Language Models from my internship at Allen AI was accepted to EACL 2023 (findings)!
Selected Publications
- Language and Task Arithmetic with Parameter-Efficient Layers for Zero-Shot Summarization
Alexandra Chronopoulou, Jonas Pfeiffer, Joshua Maynez, Xinyi Wang, Sebastian Ruder, Priyanka Agrawal
arXiv 2023 - AdapterSoup: Weight Averaging to Improve Generalization of Pretrained Language Models [slides]
Alexandra Chronopoulou, Matthew E. Peters, Alexander Fraser, Jesse Dodge
EACL 2023 (Findings) - Language-Family Adapters for Low-Resource Multilingual Neural Machine Translation [slides]
Alexandra Chronopoulou, Dario Stojanovski, Alexander Fraser
EACL LoResMT workshop 2023 - Efficient Hierarchical Domain Adaptation for Pretrained Language Models [code] [blog] [slides]
Alexandra Chronopoulou, Matthew E. Peters, Jesse Dodge
NAACL 2022
- Improving the Lexical Ability of Pretrained Language Models for Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation [code]
Alexandra Chronopoulou, Dario Stojanovski, Alexander Fraser
NAACL 2021
- Reusing a Pretrained Language Model on Languages with Limited Corpora for Unsupervised NMT [code] [slides]
Alexandra Chronopoulou, Dario Stojanovski, Alexander Fraser
EMNLP 2020
- An Embarrassingly Simple Approach for Transfer Learning from Pretrained Language Models [code]
Alexandra Chronopoulou, Christos Baziotis, Alexandros Potamianos
NAACL 2019
More
My undergrad thesis supervisor was Alexandros Potamianos. I spent a good part of 2018 and 2019 in the Speech and Language Processing group of ECE, NTUA. Thesis: Transfer Learning with Deep Neural Networks for Sentiment Analysis and Semantic Modeling. During my last undergrad year I was also working as a Machine Learning Engineer at Behavioral Signal Technologies.
I am from Athens, Greece and I enjoy literature, movies, the sea, summers in Greece, wind-surfing (lately), Thanasis’ concerts, skiing, padel, and travelling.