Natural language research announcements

["Samdani, Rajhans" <rsamdan2 AT illinois.edu>]

Hi all!

This week, we shall have the first AIIS seminar of the Fall'12 semester. Who 
better to start off with than Prof. Ray Mooney 
(http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~mooney/) who is an alumnus of the department and 
is a very entertaining speaker. 

**Also, please note that this semester, we shall have the AIIS talk on 
Fridays, 4-5 pm (instead of 2-3 pm)**

Following are the details of Prof. Mooney's talk:

When: Friday, September 14, ***4 pm***.

Where: 3405 Siebel Center.

Title: Learning Language from its Perceptual Context

Abstract:
Current systems that learn to process natural language require laboriously 
constructed human-annotated training data. Ideally, a computer would be able 
to acquire language like a child by being exposed to linguistic input in the 
context of a relevant but ambiguous perceptual environment. As a step in this 
direction, we will present systems that learn to sportscast simulated robot 
soccer games and to follow navigation instructions in virtual environments by 
simply observing sample human linguistic behavior in context. This work 
builds on our earlier work on supervised learning of semantic parsers that 
map natural language to a formal meaning representation. In order to apply 
such methods to learning from observation, we have developed methods that 
estimate the meaning of sentences from ambiguous perceptual context.

Bio:

Raymond J. Mooney is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the 
University of Texas at Austin. He received his Ph.D. in 1988 from the 
University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign. He is an author of over 150 
published research papers, primarily in the areas of machine learning and 
natural language processing. He was the President of the International 
Machine Learning Society from 2008-2011, was program co-chair for the 2006 
AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, general chair of the 2005 Human 
Language Technology Conference and Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural 
Language Processing, and co-chair of the 1990 International Conference on 
Machine Learning. He is a Fellow of both the American Association for 
Artificial Intelligence and the Association for Computing Machinery, and the 
recipient of best paper awards from the National Conference on Artificial 
Intelligence, the SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and 
Data Mining, the International Conference on Machine Learning, and the Annual 
Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. His recent research 
has focused on learning for natural-language processing, connecting language 
and perception, statistical relational learning, and transfer learning.

Hope y'all be there!
Best,
Rajhans