Natural language research announcements

["Alexandre Klementiev" <klementi AT uiuc.edu>]

Dear faculty and students,

Jacob Eisenstein, who has been offered a 2008 Beckman Postdoctoral Fellow appointment, will give a talk (details below) at the AIIS seminar this Thursday.  Student meeting with Jacob is scheduled for 2:30pm on March 6th in 3403 SC.

Thank you,


Alex



Title:  Giving Discourse Processing a Hand: Gesture cues for Discourse Structure


Speaker: 

Jacob Eisenstein, MIT


Date: Mar. 6th, 4:00pm
Location:    Siebel 3405






Abstract:

Computers cannot fully understand spoken language without access to the wide range of modalities that accompany speech. My research addresses the particularly expressive modality of hand gesture, and focuses on building structured statistical models at the intersection of speech, vision, and meaning. While individual gestures may be idiosyncratic and thus difficult to interpret, we can still leverage gesture to improve language understanding by identifying patterns between gestures, and hypothesizing similar patterns in the meaning of the associated speech. I will describe successful applications of this idea to resolve ambiguous noun phrases, improve topic segmentation, and create keyframe summaries of spoken language. 

Bio:


Jacob Eisenstein is in the final year of his PhD studies at MIT, supervised by Regina Barzilay and Randall Davis.  His research interests include statistical natural language processing, multimodal interaction, and applications of computer vision.