Natural language research announcements

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

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Subject: DISTINGUISHED LECTURESHIP SERIES - Aravind Joshi November 10, 2008
Date: Mon, 27 Oct 2008 10:00:33 -0500
From: Dittmar, Jennifer Kay 
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University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Department of Computer Science
Thomas M. Siebel Center for Computer Science
201 North Goodwin Avenue
Urbana, Illinois 61801-2302 USA

DISTINGUISHED LECTURESHIP SERIES
 AND GRADUATE SEMINAR

Towards Discourse Meaning: Complexity of Dependencies at the Discourse Level 
and at the Sentence Level


Aravind K. Joshi
Henry Salvatori Professor
Department of Computer and Information Science
Institute for Research in Cognitive Science
University of Pennsylvania

November 10 (Monday), 2008 at 4:00 p.m.
1404 Siebel Center for Computer Science

Host: Julia Hockenmaier, assisted by Mark Faust, 
mfaust AT illinois.edu<mailto:mfaust AT illinois.edu>

Abstract:


My overall goal will be to discuss some issues concerning the dependencies at the discourse level 
and at the sentence level. The relationship between natural language and formal grammars is well 
understood at the sentence level. However, we know very little about this relationship at the 
discourse level. What aspects of sentence structure, if any, are carried over to the discourse level 
and conversely?  Further, what aspects of discourse structure suggest a possibly different 
perspective on the sentence structure itself? These are some of the issues I will discuss in the 
context of an annotated corpus, the Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB)*, a corpus in which we annotate 
the discourse connectives (explicit and implicit) and their arguments together with "attributions" 
of the arguments and the relations denoted by the connectives, and also the senses of the connectives*.



I will first briefly describe PDTB and then I will focus on the complexity of dependencies in terms 
of (a) the elements that bear the dependency relations, (b) patterns of these dependencies such as 
nested and crossed dependencies, dependencies with shared arguments, and (c) attributions and their 
relationship to the dependencies, among others. I will compare these dependencies with those at the 
sentence level and discuss some issues that relate to the transition from the sentence level to the 
level of "immediate discourse" and propose some conjectures.





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*This 1 million-word corpus is the same as the WSJ corpus used by the Penn Treebank (PTB) for 
syntactic annotation and by Propbank for predicate-argument annotation. PDTB 2.0 was released by LDC 
in early January 2008.

Bio:

Aravind K. Joshi received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania. 
He is now the Henry Salvatori Professor of Computer and Cognitive Science in the Department of 
Computer and Information Science the University of Pennsylvania.  He is a former co-director of the 
Institute for Research in Cognitive Science (IRCS), also the NSF Science and technology Center at 
the University of Pennsylvania.  He is a Fellow of IEEE, a Past President of the Association for 
Computational Linguistics (ACL), a Fellow of ACM, and a Fellow of AAAI. He is a member of the 
National Academy of Engineering. His honors include the Research Excellence Award of IJCAI, the 
Lifetime Achievement Award by ACL, the David Rumelhart Award form the Cognitive Science Society, and 
the Benjamin Franklin Medal for Cognitive Science from the Franklin Institute.

Professor Joshi's has worked in various areas of computational linguistics, in particular, the 
mathematical and processing models of language, parsing, and some aspects of discourse structure.

Reception will immediately follow the talk in the 2nd floor atrium of Siebel 
Center

Attachment: Joshi Distinguished Lecture.doc
Description: MS-Word document