Natural language research announcements

[Rajhans Samdani <rsamdan2 AT illinois.edu>]

Hi All,

Hal Daume III (http://www.cs.utah.edu/~hal/) is visiting UIUC. He is going to 
give a talk in the AIIS seminar (April 2, 2pm, 3405 SC). He will also take 
part in several individual, group, and student meetings on Friday - please 
email me in case you wish to hold a meeting with him.

Here are title, abstract, and bio.

Title:
Structure and Knowledge in Natural Language Processing

Abstract:
Human language exhibits complex structure.  To be successful, machine 
learning approaches to language-related problems must be able to take 
advantage of this structure.  I will discuss several investigations into the 
relationship between structure and learning, which have led to some 
surprising conclusions about the role that structure plays in language 
processing.  From there, I will consider the question of: where does this 
structure come from.  By taking insights from linguistic typology, I will 
show that very simple typological information can lead to significant 
increases in system performance for some simple syntactic problems.  
Moreover, I will show how this typological information can be mined from raw 
data.

(This talk includes joint work with Dan Klein, John Langford, Percy
Liang, Daniel Marcu, and some of my students: Arvind Agarwal, Adam Teichert 
and Piyush Rai.)

Bio:
Hal Daume III is an assistant professor in the School of Computing at the 
University of Utah. His primary research interests are in understanding how 
to get human knowledge into a machine learning system in the most efficient 
way possible. In practice, he works primarily in the areas of Bayesian 
learning (particularly non-parametric methods), structured prediction and 
domain adaptation (with a focus on problems in language and biology). He 
associates himself most with conferences like ACL, ICML, NIPS and EMNLP. He 
earned his PhD at the University of Southern Californian with a thesis on 
structured prediction for language (his advisor was Daniel Marcu). He spent 
the summer of 2003 working with Eric Brill in the machine learning and 
applied statistics group at Microsoft Research. Prior to that, he studied 
math (mostly logic) at Carnegie Mellon University. He still likes math and 
doesn't like to use C (instead he uses O'Caml or Haskell). He doesn't like 
shoes, but does like act!
 iv!
ities that are hard on your feet: skiing, badminton, Aikido and rock climbing.

Thanks!
Regards,
Rajhans


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