Natural language research announcements

[Rajhans Samdani <rsamdan2 AT illinois.edu>]

Hi all,

This is a gentle reminder of today's AIIS talk.

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. 

Thanks!
Best,
Rajhans


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