Natural language research announcements

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

Dear faculty and students,

Benjamin Snyder will give a talk (details below) at the AIIS seminar this Thursday.  If you would like to meet with Ben personally, please let me know.

Thank you,
Alex

Title: Multilingual Learning for Unsupervised Linguistic Analysis
Speaker: Benjamin Snyder, MIT
Date: May 8, 4:00pm
Location: Siebel 3405

Abstract:

For centuries, the deep connection between human languages has fascinated linguists, anthropologists and historians. The study of this connection has made major discoveries about human communication possible: it has revealed the evolution of languages, facilitated the reconstruction of proto-languages, and led to understanding language universals. The connection between languages should be a powerful source of information for automatic linguistic analysis as well. In this line of work I investigate two questions: (i) Can we exploit cross-lingual correspondences to improve unsupervised language learning? (ii) Will this joint analysis provide more or less benefit when the languages belong to the same family?

I will present multilingual generative unsupervised models for morphological segmentation and part-of-speech tagging. In both instances we model the multilingual data as arising through a combination of language-independent and language-specific probabilistic processes. This feature allows the model to identify and learn from recurring cross-lingual patterns to improve prediction accuracy in each language.

I will also discuss ongoing work on the unsupervised decoding of the ancient Ugaritic script using data from related (Semitic) languages.

Bio:

Benjamin Snyder is a third year PhD student at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT.