Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for October
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NL Seminar- CoQA, A Conversational Question Answering Challenge
Thu, Oct 04, 2018 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Siva Reddy , Stanford University
Talk Title: CoQA: A Conversational Question Answering Challenge
Series: Natural Language Seminar
Abstract: Humans gather information by engaging in conversations involving a series of interconnected questions and answers. For machines to assist in information gathering, it is therefore essential to enable them to answer conversational questions. In this talk, I will present our work on CoQA, a novel dataset for building Conversational Question Answering systems. CoQA contains 127k questions with answers, obtained from 8k conversations about text passages from seven diverse domains. The questions are conversational, and the answers are free-form text with their corresponding evidence highlighted in the passage. We analyze CoQA in depth and show that conversational questions have challenging phenomena not present in existing reading comprehension datasets, e.g., coreference and pragmatic reasoning. We evaluate strong conversational and reading comprehension models on CoQA. The best system obtains an F1 score of 65.1%, which is 23.7 points behind human performance 88.8 percent, indicating there is ample room for improvement. We launch CoQA as a challenge to the community. See link below.
Biography: Siva Reddy is a postdoc in Computer Science at Stanford University working with Prof. Christopher Manning. His research focuses on enabling natural communication between humans and machines. Prior to the postdoc, he was a Google PhD Fellow at the University of Edinburgh under the supervision of Prof. Mirella Lapata and Prof. Mark Steedman.
Host: Xusen Yin
More Info: https://stanfordnlp.github.io/coqa/
Webcast: https://bluejeans.com/s/iHu_F/Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 6th Floor Conf Rm-CR# 689
WebCast Link: https://bluejeans.com/s/iHu_F/
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Peter Zamar
Event Link: https://stanfordnlp.github.io/coqa/
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-Mapping Functions for Multilingual Word Embeddings
Fri, Oct 12, 2018 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Ndapa Nakashole, UCSD
Talk Title: Mapping Functions for Multilingual Word Embeddings
Series: Natural Language Seminar
Abstract: Inducing multilingual word embeddings by learning a linear map between embedding spaces of different languages achieves remarkable accuracy on related languages. However, accuracy drops substantially when translating between distant languages. Given that languages exhibit differences in vocabulary, grammar, written form, or syntax, one would expect that embedding spaces of different languages have different structures especially for distant languages. I will present our work on understanding the behavior of linear maps learned by word translation methods. Additionally, I will present some initial solutions to the shortcomings of such linear maps.
Biography: Ndapa Nakashole is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego. Prior to UCSD, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University. She obtained her PhD from Saarland University, Germany, for research carried out at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Saarbrücken. She completed undergraduate studies in Computer Science at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.
Host: Xusen Yin
More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
Webcast: https://bluejeans.com/s/R09BB/Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th Flr Conf Rm # 1135, Marina Del Rey
WebCast Link: https://bluejeans.com/s/R09BB/
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. -
NL Seminar-Conversational Question Answering
Thu, Oct 25, 2018 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Scott Yih, AI2
Talk Title: Conversational Question Answering
Series: Natural Language Seminar
Abstract: Humans seek information in a conversational manner, by asking follow-up questions for additional information based on what they have already learned. In this talk, I will first introduce the task of sequential question answering 1. which aims to fulfill user's information need by answering a series of simple, but interdependent questions regarding a given table. Treating this task as a semantic parsing problem, we developed a policy shaping mechanism that incorporates prior knowledge and an update equation that generalizes three different families of learning algorithms 2. After that, I will then talk briefly about QuAC, a new dataset for Question Answering in Context. QuAC targets the scenario where the information source is unstructured text 3. and thus can be viewed as a conversational machine comprehension task. New, unpublished model ideas will also be discussed.
Biography: Scott Wen-tau Yih is a Principal Research Scientist at Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence AI2. His research interests include natural language processing, machine learning and information retrieval. Yih received his Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His work on joint inference using integer linear programming ILP has been widely adopted in the NLP community for numerous structured prediction problems. Prior to joining AI2, Yih has spent 12 years at Microsoft Research, working on a variety of projects including email spam filtering, keyword extraction and search & ad relevance. His recent work focuses on continuous representations and neural network models, with applications in knowledge base embedding, semantic parsing and question answering. Yih received the best paper award from CoNLL-2011, an outstanding paper award from ACL-2015 and has served as area co-chairs HLT-NAACL-12, ACL-14, EMNLP-16,17,18, program co-chairs CEAS-09, CoNLL-14 and action associated editors TACL, JAIR in recent years. He is also a co-presenter for several tutorials on topics including Semantic Role Labeling NAACL-HLT-06, AAAI-07, Deep Learning for NLP SLT-14, NAACL-HLT-15, IJCAI-16, NLP for Precision Medicine ACL-17, AAAI-18.
Host: Xusen Yin
More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
Webcast: https://bluejeans.com/s/jIoDx/Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 6th Floor Conf Rm-CR# 689
WebCast Link: https://bluejeans.com/s/jIoDx/
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.
