Natural language research announcements

["Roth, Dan" <danr AT uiuc.edu>]

 

 

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From: Schaefer, Melinda M [mailto:mschaefr AT cs.uiuc.edu]
Sent: Thursday, July 03, 2008 3:59 PM
To: ifaculty AT cs.uiuc.edu; cs-grads AT cs.uiuc.edu
Cc: mschaefr AT uiuc.edu; King, Robin Brian
Subject: Data Science Summer Institute Talk, Ed Hovy, July 8th at 10:00

 

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

 

 

Data Science Summer Institute Talk

 

 

Ontologies: An Introduction

 

 

Ed Hovy, Director

Center for Knowledge Integration and Discovery (CKID)

USC 

Tuesday, July 8, 2008 at 10:00 A.M.

3405 Siebel Center for Computer Science

 

 

 

Abstract:

Research in natural language processing (NLP) over the past fifteen years has produced impressive practical results using statistical methods.  But increasingly there are signs that continued quality improvement in language processing applications (including QA, summarization, information extraction, and machine translation) requires deeper and richer representations, possibly even (shallow) semantics of text meaning.  Although theories of semantics (formal and informal) abound, no-one has yet built a resource of semantic symbols that effectively supports NLP, that is empirically based, and that has been validated through human agreement scores.  Can this be done?  This talk describes the construction of the Omega ontology to support various NLP applications, in the context of the OntoNotes project in DARPA’s GALE program.  Omega contains an Upper Model of about a hundred manually constructed and organized terms and a Middle Model of several thousand ‘sense pools’, where each sense pool is a collection of word senses from English, Arabic, and Chinese nouns and verbs, and includes one or more associated atomic features to support reasoning, as well as pointers to hundreds of individual sentences containing a word with the appropriate sense.  The creation of senses, their pooling, and their integration into Omega is carried out by teams of annotators, and is subjected to cross-annotator agreement tests and other semi-automated validation procedures.  To our knowledge, this is by far the most extensive ontology building effort that involves such validation. 

 

This work is a collaboration of researchers at USC/ISI and the University of Colorado at Boulder.

 

Bio:

 

Eduard Hovy directs the DHS Center for Knowledge Integration and Discovery at the University of Southern California, where he also leads the Natural Language Research Group at USC’s Information Sciences Institute and serves as Deputy Director of the Intelligent Systems Division and as research associate professor of the Computer Science Department.  He completed a Ph.D. in Computer Science (Artificial Intelligence) at Yale University in 1987.  His research focuses on information extraction, automated text summarization, the semi-automated construction of large lexicons and ontologies, machine translation, question answering, and digital government.  Dr. Hovy regularly serves in an advisory capacity to funders of NLP research in the US and EU.  He is the author or co-editor of five books and over 180 technical articles.  In 2001 Dr. Hovy served as President of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and in 2001–03 as President of the International Association of Machine Translation (IAMT); he currently serves as President of the Digital Government Society of North America (DGSNA). Dr. Hovy regularly co-teaches a course in the Master’s Degree Program in Computer Science at the University of Southern California, as well as occasional short courses on MT and other topics at universities and conferences.  He has served on the Ph.D. and M.S. committees for students from USC, Carnegie Mellon University, Taiwan National U, the Universities of Toronto, Karlsruhe, Pennsylvania, Stockholm, Waterloo, Nijmegen, Pretoria, and Ho Chi Minh City.

 

URLs:

http://www.isi.edu/natural-language/nlp-at-isi.html

http://www.isi.edu/~hovy.html

 

 

 

 

Melinda Schaefer

Department of Computer Science

University of Illinois, Urbana/Champaign

201 N. Goodwin Ave

2232 Siebel Center, MC-258

Urbana, IL 61801

(217)333-6454

mschaefr AT uiuc.edu