Natural language research announcements

[Rajhans Samdani <rsamdan2 AT illinois.edu>]

Gentle reminder.

Hi all,

Prof. Noah Smith from CMU (http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~nasmith/) is visiting UIUC. 
He is going to give a talk in the AIIS seminar (May 7, 2pm, 3405 SC). Noah 
Smith works in Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing.

Here are title, abstract, and bio.

Title:
Text-Driven Forecasting:  Meaning as a Real Number

Abstract:

We take inspiration from recent research on sentiment analysis that
interprets text based on the subjective attitude of the author.  We
consider related tasks where a piece of text is interpreted to predict
some extrinsic, real-valued outcome of interest that can be observed
in non-text data.  Examples include:

* The interpretation of an annual financial report from a company to its 
shareholders is the risk incurred by investing in the company in
the coming year.

* The interpretation of a critic's review of a film is the film's box
office success.

* The interpretation of a political blog post is the response it
garners from readers.

* The interpretation of a day's microblog feeds is the public's
opinion about a particular issue.

In all of these cases, one aspect of the text's meaning is observable
from objective real-world data, although perhaps not immediately at
the time the text is published (respectively:  return volatility, gross 
revenue, user comments, and traditional polls).  We propose a
generic approach to text-driven forecasting that is expected to benefit from 
linguistic analysis while remaining neutral to different
theories of language.  A highly attractive property of this line of research 
is that evaluation is objective, inexpensive, and theory-neutral.  This 
approach introduces some methodological
challenges, as well.

We conjecture that forecasting tasks, when considered in concert, will be a 
driving force in domain-specific, empirical, and extrinsically
useful natural language analysis.  Further, this research direction
will push NLP to consider the language of a more diverse subset of the 
population, and may support inquiry in the social sciences about 
foreknowledge and communication in societies.

This talk includes joint work with Ramnath Balasubramanyan, William Cohen, 
Dipanjan Das, Kevin Gimpel, Mahesh Joshi, Shimon Kogan, Dimitry Levin, 
Brendan O'Connor, Bryan Routledge, Jacob Sagi, and Tae Yano.

Bio:
Noah Smith is an assistant professor in the School of Computer Science at 
Carnegie Mellon University. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science, as a 
Hertz Foundation Fellow, from Johns Hopkins University in 2006 and his B.S. 
in Computer Science and B.A. in Linguistics from the University of Maryland 
in 2001. His research interests include statistical natural language 
processing, especially unsupervised methods, machine learning for structured 
data, and applications of natural language processing. He serves on the 
editorial board of the journal Computational Linguistics and received a best 
paper award at the ACL 2009 conference. His ten-person group, Noah's ARK, is 
supported by the NSF, DARPA, Qatar NRF, Portugal FCT, and gifts from Google, 
HP Labs, and IBM Research.

Thanks!
Regards,
Rajhans


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