Natural language research announcements

["Hockenmaier, Julia Constanze" <juliahmr AT cs.uiuc.edu>]

> Dear faculty and students,
>
> We are re-starting our AIIS seminar <http://nlp.cs.uiuc.edu/seminar/>  this
> semester with a talk by Nathan Srebro (details below) next Thursday.
>
> Hope to see you there,
> Alex.
>
> Title: More Data Less Work: SVM Training in Time Decreasing with Larger Data
> Sets
> Speaker: Nathan Srebro, TTI Chicago
>
> Date: September 11, 4:00pm
> Location: Siebel 3405
>
> Abstract:
>
> Traditional runtime analysis of training Support Vector Machines, and indeed
> most learning methods, shows how the training runtime increases as more
> training examples are available. Considering the true objective of training,
> which is to obtain a good predictor, I will argue that training time should 
> be
> studied as a decreasing function of training set size. I will then present
> both theoretical and empirical results demonstrating how a simple stochastic
> subgradient descent approach for training SVMs indeed displays such 
> monotonic
> decreasing behavior.
>
> I will also discuss a similar phenomena in the context of Gaussian mixture
> clustering, where it appears that excess data turns the problem from
> computationally intractable to computationally tractable.
>
> Joint work with Shai Shalev-Shwartz, Yoram Singer, Greg Shakhnarovich and 
> Sam
> Roweis.
>
>