Natural language research announcements

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

Hi all,

This is a gentle reminder for today's AIIS seminar talk by Prof. Graeme Hirst 
(http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~gh/) from U Toronto. The details of the talk are 
below.

Details of the talk:

When: Friday, Nov 30, 4 pm.

Where: Room 3405 Siebel Center.

Title:
Natural language processing methods for the detection of symptoms of
Alzheimer's disease in writing

Abstract:
Studies of language in Alzheimer's disease have concluded that, along
with a general cognitive decline, linguistic features are also
negatively affected. Studies of the language of healthy elders also
observe a linguistic decline, but one which, in contrast, is markedly
less severe than that induced by dementia.  We examine whether the
disease can be detected from the diachronic changes in written texts
and, more importantly, whether it can be clearly distinguished from
normal aging.  Lexical and syntactic analyses were conducted on 51
novels by three prolific literary authors: Iris Murdoch, P.D. James,
and Agatha Christie. Murdoch was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease
shortly after finishing her last novel; James, at 89 years of age,
continues to publish critically-acclaimed works; Christie, whose last
few novels are deemed strikingly subpar compared to her previous
works, presents an interesting case study of possible dementia.  The
lexical analysis reveals significant patterns of decline in Murdoch's
and Christie's later novels, while James's rates remain relatively
consistent throughout her career.  The syntactic measures, though
unveiling fewer significant linear trends, discover a cubic model of
change in Murdoch's novels, with a deep decline around her 50s. Our
findings provide support for the hypothesis that dementia, which
manifests clearly in lexical features, can be detected in writing.

This is joint work with Xuan Le, Ian Lancashire, and Regina Jokel.

Bio:
Graeme Hirst's research interests cover a range of topics in
computational linguistics, natural language processing, and related
areas of cognitive science including lexical semantics, the
resolution of ambiguity in text, the preservation of author's style
in machine translation, recovering from misunderstanding and
non-understanding in human-computer communication, and linguistic
constraints on knowledge-representation systems.  He is the author of
two monographs: Anaphora in Natural Language Understanding  and
Semantic Interpretation and the Resolution of Ambiguity, and is
editor of the Synthesis book series in Human Language Technologies.
He is the recipient of two awards for excellence in teaching, and has
supervised more than 40 theses and dissertations, four of which have
been published as books.  He was elected Chair of the North American
Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics for 2004-05
and Treasurer of the Association for 2008-2012.

Hoping to see you all!
Best,
Rajhans