Natural language research announcements

["Margaret M. Fleck" <mfleck AT cs.uiuc.edu>]

-------- Original Message --------
Subject:        DISTINGUISHED LECTURESHIP SERIES, Eugene Charniak, Feb. 5
Date:   Wed, 31 Jan 2007 10:56:07 -0600
From:   Erna A Amerman 
<erna AT cs.uiuc.edu>
To:     
<ifaculty AT cs.uiuc.edu>
CC:     
<clerical AT cs.uiuc.edu>



Prof. Gerald DeJong is the host assisted by Ronda Pellegrini at 
rpellegr AT cs.uiuc.edu.







University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Department of Computer Science

The Thomas M. Siebel Center for Computer Science

201 North Goodwin Avenue

Urbana, Illinois 61801-2302  USA





*/ /*

*/DISTINGUISHED LECTURESHIP SERIES/*

*/ (and Graduate Seminar)/*








       */Recent Results in Parsing/*


 */ /**//*

                                              

Eugene Charniak

                                               Department of Computer 
Science


           Brown University



February 5 (Monday), 2007 at 4:00 p.m.

                                               1404 Siebel Center for 
Computer Science



                                              

Parsing is the problem of mapping a string (in, say, English) to a 
phrase structure.  It is important because it gives us a first rough cut 
at meaning.  During the 1990s there was a flurry of new results using 
statistical techniques that gave us our first robust parsers ready for 
every-day use.  While there has been continued results since then, the 
practical parsers at the start of 2005 were no better than what has 
available in 2000.  The first part of the talk will recap this ancient 
history.



The last two years, however, have seen a dramatic turn-around with error 
rates decreasing by 25%.  The second and third parts of the talk 
describe the two techniques responsible for this state of affairs: 
discriminative reranking and self training.  We also show that the 
latest results seem to be less corpus specific than the previous 
results.  (That is, they carry over to text corpora reasonably different 
than those upon which they were trained.





Bio:

Eugene Charniak is University Professor of Computer Science and 
Cognitive Science at Brown University and past chair of the Department 
of Computer Science.  He received his A.B. degree in Physics from 
University of Chicago, and a Ph.D. from M.I.T. in Computer Science.  He 
has published four books the most recent being Statistical Language 
Learning.  He is a Fellow of the American Association of Artificial 
Intelligence and was previously a Councilor of the organization.  His 
research has always been in the area of language understanding or 
technologies which relate to it.  Over the last 15 years he has been 
interested in statistical techniques for parsing, speech recognition, 
and other areas of language processing.





Reception after the talk in the 2^nd Floor Atrium of Siebel Center.





If you would like to subscribe to announcement:  

http://mail.cs.uiuc.edu/mailman/listinfo/announce

Attachment: POSTER Feb. 5, DLS Eugene Charniak (DeJong-RP).doc
Description: MS-Word document