Events for June 07, 2013
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AI SEMINAR
Fri, Jun 07, 2013 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Benjamin Snyder, Assistant Professor UW-Madison
Talk Title: Dead Languages, and Elbow Grease: Minimally Supervised NLP Models.
Series: AISeminar
Abstract: I will discuss new techniques for inducing accurate statistical models for low resource languages. In the extreme case of language decipherment, we are presented with a text with no knowledge of the language or writing system, and our goal is to identify the phonetic properties of the characters. I will present a Bayesian model that predicts whether letters are consonants or vowels with over 99% accuracy across 503 languages. The model assumes that languages are grouped into latent clusters with shared phonotactic regularities. We perform posterior inference over the identity and shared parameters of these clusters.
In a more common scenario, we are trying to build a model (e.g. for a low resource language) while minimizing our annotation effort. I will present a method based on matrix projections that allows us to quickly identify an optimal set of examples to label. This method outperforms active learning while obviating the need for incremental retraining and bootstrapping. We report error reductions of 25-40% on the tasks of pronunciation modeling and part-of-speech tagging.
Biography: Benjamin Snyder is an assistant professor of computer science at UW-Madison. He completed his PhD at MIT in 2010, receiving the ACM Dissertation Award honorable mention and the George M. Sprowls Award for best PhD thesis in computer science at MIT. He will be visiting ISI For all of June.
Host: David Chiang
Webcast: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/SilverlightPlayer/Default.aspx?peid=ec818feeeb5b458e87121185990150ef1dLocation: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th fl Large CR
WebCast Link: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/SilverlightPlayer/Default.aspx?peid=ec818feeeb5b458e87121185990150ef1d
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Alma Nava / Information Sciences Institute
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor. -
NL Seminar- Malte Nuhn "Is Decipherment Difficult"
Fri, Jun 07, 2013 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Malte Nuhn, Aachen University, Germany
Talk Title: "Is Decipherment Difficult"
Series: Natural Language Seminar
Abstract: Abstract: Is it possible to learn useful translations from large amounts of monolingual data to improve machine translation? The intuitive feeling is that learning a language without bilingual data is at least "more difficult than learning from example translations". In this talk, I will present recent results on decipherment: I will show that the decipherment problem is indeed difficult (NP-hard) and what approximations to the original problem can be made without hurting decipherment accuracy much.
Biography: Bio: Having studied Physics and Computer Science at RWTH Aachen University, I'm currently a PhD student at Prof. Ney's Human Language Technology and Pattern Recognition Group in Aachen. I'm particularly interested in applying decipherment techniques to improve machine translation.
Homepage:
http://www-i6.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/~nuhn/
Host: Kevin Knight and Qing Dou
More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - Marina Del Rey-11th Flr Conf Rm # 1135
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Peter Zamar
Event Link: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor.
