Natural language research announcements

[Rajhans Samdani <rsamdan2 AT illinois.edu>]

Dear Faculty and Students,

In the AIIS seminar (http://l2r.cs.uiuc.edu/~cogcomp/aiis/), this week we 
have a talk by Michael Connor who is a student of Prof. Dan Roth. The talk is 
scheduled at 2 pm, March 5'th (i.e. Friday) in room no. 3405 SC. Attached 
with this mail are the title and the abstract of the talk and the bio of the 
speaker. 

Title:
Starting From Scratch in Semantic Role Labeling

Abstract:
A fundamental step in sentence comprehension involves assigning  semantic 
roles to sentence constituents. To accomplish this, the listener must parse 
the sentence, find constituents that are candidate arguments, and assign 
semantic roles to those constituents. Each step depends on prior lexical and 
syntactic knowledge. Where do children learning their first languages begin 
in solving this problem? In this work we attempt to train a Semantic Role 
Labeling system with only high level semantic feedback and 
psycholinguistically-motivated background knowledge.  We combine a simplified 
SRL with an unsupervised HMM part of speech tagger trained on actual child 
directed speech.  The results show that proposed shallow representations of 
sentence structure are robust to reductions in parsing accuracy, and that the 
contribution of alternative representations of sentence structure to 
successful semantic role labeling varies with the integrity of the parsing 
and argument-identification s!
 ta!
ges.

Hope to see you all there!
Regards,
Rajhans Samdani


Rajhans Samdani,
Graduate Student,
Dept. of Computer Science,
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.