Natural language research announcements

[Rajhans Samdani <rsamdan2 AT illinois.edu>]

Hi all,

We have two AIIS seminar talks lined up for the next 7 days. Please look 
below for 
the details of both.

First talk
-------------

When: Friday, Oct 29, 2-3 pm. 

Where: 3405 SC. 

Speaker: Prof. Rebecca Hwa (http://www.cs.pitt.edu/~hwa/)

Title: 
Information visualization and its applications for machine translation

Abstract: 
In this talk, I will present an interactive interface that helps users
to explore and understand imperfect outputs from automatic machine 
translation (MT) 
systems. The target users of our system are people who do not understand the 
original (source) language. Through a visualization of multiple linguistic 
resources, our 
system enables users to identify potential translation mistakes and make 
educated 
guesses as to how to correct them.  Experimental results suggest that users 
of our 
prototype are able to correct some difficult translation errors that they 
would have
found baffling otherwise. The experiments further suggest adaptive methods to 
improve 
standard phrase-based machine translation systems.

Bio: 
Rebecca Hwa is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer
Science at the University of Pittsburgh. Before joining Pitt, she was a 
postdoc at 
University of Maryland. She received her PhD in Computer Science from Harvard 
University in 2001 and her B.S. in Computer Science and Engineering from UCLA 
in 
1993. Dr. Hwa's primary research interests include multilingual processing, 
machine 
translation, and semi-supervised learning methods. Additionally, she has 
collaborated
with colleagues on information visualization, sentiment analysis, and 
bioinformatics. 
She is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award. Her work has also been supported 
by 
NIH and DARPA. Dr. Hwa currently serves as the chair person of the executive 
board 
of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational 
Linguistics.

Second Talk
-------------------

When: Monday, Nov 1, 3-4 pm.

Where: 3405 SC.

Speaker: Dr. Chin-Yew Lin (http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/cyl/)

Title: 
Question Answering - The Easy Way? 

Abstract: 
With the booming of user participating online services such as Yahoo! 
Answers, 
Facebook Questions, MSDN forums, and plain old online discussion forums, a 
lot of 
valuable knowledge have been accumulated. To explore the potential impact of 
these 
user generated content (UGC), we focus our research on utilizing established 
user 
communities, their networks, and their content to facilitate three 
activities: 
assimilation, dissemination, and elicitation of community knowledge. 

In this talk, I will introduce recent progress on Scalable Question Answering 
and 
Distillation (SQuAD) - a question answering (QA) project aiming to crawl, 
index, and 
serve question and answer pairs at web scale. I will use question answering 
as an 
example to illustrate the approach that we are taking toward solving real 
world 
problems. Question answering has been an active research field in information 
retrieval and natural language processing. Despite the "success" of TREC QA 
track, 
large scale robust QA systems are yet to be found in the real world. Instead 
of taking 
a traditional QA approach, SQuAD focuses on mining and organizing existing QA 
pairs from the web. I will address six main challenges of the project and 
present our 
solutions. In particular, I will show the importance of question type, drill 
down on 
comparative questions, and summarize lessons learned from our participation 
of the 
NTCIR Pilot Community Question Answering track. 

Bio:
Dr. Chin-Yew LIN is a senior researcher and research manager of Microsoft 
Research 
Asia (MSRA). Before joining Microsoft in 2006, He was a research scientist at 
the 
Information Sciences Institute at University of Southern California (USC/ISI) 
where he 
worked in the Natural Language Processing and Machine Translation group since 
1997. His research interests are natural language processing, information 
retrieval and 
social computing. He also developed automatic evaluation technologies for 
summarization, QA, and MT. In particular, he created the ROUGE automatic 
summarization evaluation package. It has become the de facto standard in 
summarization evaluations. More than 200 research sites worldwide have 
downloaded 
this package. 

Dr. Lin is the program co-chair of ACL 2012 and program co-chair of AAAI 2011 
AI 
and the Web special track. He was program co-chair of AIRS 2009. He also 
served as 
an area chair in ACL. He is an associate editor of ACM Transaction on Asian 
Language Information Processing. 

Hoping to see you at both the talks.
Best, 
Rajhans 


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