Natural language research announcements

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

________________________________________
From: Schaefer, Melinda M 
[mschaefr AT cs.uiuc.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, July 09, 2008 9:37 AM
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, Raymond Mooney, July 11th at 3:15

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


Learning Language from its Perceptual Context


Raymond J. Mooney, Professor
Department of Computer Science
University of Texas at Austin
Friday, July 11, 2008 at 3:15 P.M.
2405 Siebel Center for Computer Science



Abstract:

Current systems that learn to process natural language require laboriously 
constructed human-annotated training data. Ideally, a computer would be able 
to acquire language like a child by being exposed to linguistic input in the 
context of a relevant but ambiguous perceptual environment. As a step in this 
direction, we present a system that learns to sportscast simulated soccer 
games by example. The training data consists of textual human commentaries on 
Robocup simulation games. A set of possible meanings for each comment is 
automatically constructed from game event traces. Our previously developed 
systems for learning to parse and generate natural language (KRISP and WASP) 
were augmented to learn from this data and then commentate novel games. The 
system is evaluated based on its ability to parse sentences into correct 
meanings and generate accurate descriptions of game events. Human evaluation 
was also conducted on the overall quality of the generated sportscasts and 
compared to human-generated commentaries.
Bio:

Raymond J. Mooney is a Professor in the Department of Computer Sciences at 
the University of Texas at Austin. He received his Ph.D. in 1988 from the 
University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign. He is an author of over 150 
published research papers, primarily in the areas of machine learning and 
natural language processing. He is the current President of the International 
Machine Learning Soceity, was program co-chair for the 2006 AAAI Conference 
on Artificial Intelligence, general chair of the 2005 Human Language 
Technology Conference and Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language 
Processing, and co-chair of the 1990 International Conference on Machine 
Learning. He is a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial 
Intelligence and recipient of best paper awards from the National Conference 
on Artificial Intelligence, the SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge 
Discovery and Data Mining, and the Annual Meeting of the Association for 
Computational Linguistics. His recent research has focused on learning for 
natural-language processing, text mining for bioinformatics, statistical 
relational learning, and transfer learning.


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<mailto:mschaefr AT uiuc.edu>