“Join us on Thursday, January 29, 2026, at 12:00 PM PT/3:00 PM ET for the lecture: “Beyond LLMs: Neuro-Symbolic Approaches for Language Understanding in the Biomedical Domain” by Dr. Mihai Surdeanu. This lecture is part of the Bridge2AI Training, Recruitment, and Mentoring (TRM) 2025-26 Lecture Series Novel AI Technology Module.

Lecture Learning Objectives:

• Understand the advantages and disadvantages of neural (in particular LLM) architectures vs. neuro-symbolic approaches in the biomedical space.
• Learn how to build symbolic and neuro-symbolic natural language processing systems that are faithful, pliable, and fast.

Biography:

Dr. Mihai Surdeanu is a Professor of Computer Science in the College of Science at the University of Arizona, with joint appointments in Linguistics and Cognitive Science. His research focuses on natural language processing, including question answering, information extraction, and building systems that derive meaning from unstructured text, with a strong emphasis on interpretable models that can explain their decisions.

Dr. Surdeanu has received the ACL Outstanding Area Chair Award (2023) and the Distinguished Scholar Award from the University of Arizona’s Department of Computer Science (2023). He is an active contributor to the NLP community, serving as an Action Editor for Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL) since 2019 and as Senior Area Chair for ACL (2023, 2025) and EMNLP (2022). He has held Area Chair roles for EMNLP, NAACL, and COLING–LREC across multiple years. Dr. Surdeanu has also served on program committees for ACL and EMNLP for a long time, in addition to contributing to COLM, COLING, as well as Graph-Based NLP and Pan-DL workshops.”

Introduction Slides