About me

I'm Seraphina Goldfarb-Tarrant, and I -

• am the Head of Safety at Cohere, where I try my best to evaluate and mitigate any societal harms cause by language models, and to make LMs more trustworthy,
• am nearly done with a PhD at the University of Edinburgh in ILCC, advised by Adam Lopez, in Fairness for NLP, with a focus on Transfer learning and Multilinguality.
• have an MSc in NLP from University of Washington
• did research in Creative Neural Natural Language Generation (a mouthful, aka NLG for short), at the Information Sciences Institute in the lab of Nanyun (Violet) Peng.
• think this bio reminds me a bit of this.

I have a varied background: I have a BA in Ancient Greek, and I have lived in many places around the world and worked in a few different fields. My homes have been Tokyo, NYC, San Francisco, Seattle, Shanghai - in those places I've worked both for Google and on smaller projects.

As well as being extremely passionate about NLP, I am a professional sailor and spent a few years sailing the North Sea. I also study Rinzai Zen, which is the type with the riddles (koans) and samurai associations.

Feel free to check out my CV and my research/publications.

I also started a blog, where I will explain my research (and sometimes some other people’s) in a way that I hope is understandable to anyone curious enough to read it. But as is the case with all blogs, I wrote one article ever and then abandoned the enterprise, though I do write some content at Cohere and may link that here eventually.

I am quite passionate about explaining things well, and frequently give talks and lectures. I also mentor students (am sometimes open to co-supervising) and I accept interns at Cohere. If any of these things interest you, please feel free to get in touch!

If you need a blurb for an event I am speaking at, you may nick this one below:
Seraphina Goldfarb-Tarrant is the Head of Safety at Cohere, where she works on both the practice and the theory of evaluating and mitigating harms from LLMs. She did her PhD under Adam Lopez in Fairness in Transfer Learning for NLP, at the Institute for Language, Cognition, and Computation (ILCC) in the Informatics department at the University of Edinburgh. She did her MSc in NLP, with a focus on Natural Language Generation, at the University of Washington under Fei Xia in collaboration with Nanyun Peng. Her research interests include the intersection of fairness with robustness and generalisation, cross-lingual transfer, and causal analysis. She had an industry career before her PhD, where she worked at Google in Tokyo, NYC, and Shanghai. She also spent two years as a sailor in the North Sea.