Natural language research announcements

[Yonatan Bisk <bisk1 AT illinois.edu>]

-- Reminder --

When:          __Today__ @ 2pm
Where:         3405 SC
Speaker:      Luke Zettlemoyer ( http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/lsz/ )

http://cogcomp.cs.illinois.edu/sites/aiis/luke_zettlemoyer.html

Title:             Learning Semantic  Parsers for More Languages and
with Less Supervision

Abstract:

Recent work has demonstrated effective learning algorithms for a
variety of semantic parsing problems, where the goal is to
automatically recover the underlying meaning of input sentences.
Although these algorithms can work well, there is still a large cost
in annotating data and gathering other language-specific resources for
each new application. In this talk, I will describe efforts to address
these challenges by developing scalable, probabilistic CCG grammar
induction algorithms. I will present recent work on methods that
incorporate new notions of lexical generalization, thereby enabling
effective learning for a variety of different natural languages and
formal meaning representations. I will also describe a new approach
for learning semantic parsers from conversational data, which does not
require any manual annotation of sentence meaning. Finally, I will
sketch future directions, including our recurring focus on building
scalable learning techniques while attempting to minimize the
application-specific engineering effort.


Joint work with Yoav Artzi, Tom Kwiatkowski, Sharon Goldwater, and
Mark Steedman

Bio:

Luke Zettlemoyer is an Assistant Professor at the University of
Washington. His research interests are in the intersections of natural
language processing, machine learning and decision making under
uncertainty. He spends much of his time developing learning algorithms
that attempt to recover and make use of detailed representations of
the meaning of natural language text. He was postdoctoral research
fellow at the University of Edinburgh and received his Ph.D. from MIT.


Reminder:
The full calendars can be found at:
http://cogcomp.cs.illinois.edu/sites/aiis/index.html
http://illinois.edu/calendar/list/3407