Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for November
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Special NL Seminar-Jerry Hobbs :
Fri, Nov 01, 2013 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Jerry Hobbs , USC/ISI
Series: Natural Language Seminar
Abstract: This talk is the talk I gave at the ACL meeting in Sofia, Bulgaria, in August, on receiving the ACL Lifetime Achievement Award. In line with the developing tradition, it is a mixture of personal anecdotes, moments in the history of computational linguistics that I witnessed, and technical material. The last of these includes issues of representation, interpretation, and encoding commonsense knowledge.
Biography: Dr. Jerry R. Hobbs is a prominent researcher in the fields of computational linguistics, discourse analysis, and artificial intelligence. He earned his doctor's degree from New York University in 1974 in computer science. He has taught at Yale University and the City University of New York. From 1977 to 2002 he was with the Artificial Intelligence Center at SRI International, Menlo Park, California, where he was a Principal Scientist and Program Director of the Natural Language Program. He has written numerous papers in the areas of parsing, syntax, semantic interpretation, information extraction, knowledge representation, encoding commonsense knowledge, discourse analysis, the structure of conversation, and the Semantic Web. He has done groundbreaking work in the areas of granularity, representing qualitative concepts, encoding commonsense psychology, and interpreting natural language using abduction. He is the author of the book "Literature and Cognition", and was also editor of the book "Formal Theories of the Commonsense World". He led SRI's text-understanding research, and directed the development of the abduction-based TACITUS system for text understanding, and the FASTUS system for rapid extraction of information from text based on finite-state transducers. The latter system constituted the basis for an SRI spinoff, Discern Communications. In September 2002 he took a position as research professor and ISI Fellow at the Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California, where he is now Director of the Natural Language Group. He has been a consulting professor with the Linguistics Department and the Symbolic Systems Program at Stanford University. He has served as general editor of the Ablex Series on Artificial Intelligence. He is a past president of the Association for Computational Linguistics, and is a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. In January 2003 he was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Philosophy from the University of Uppsala, Sweden. In August 2013 he received the Association for Computational Linguistics Lifetime Achievement Award.
Home Page:
http://www.isi.edu/~hobbs/
Host: Yigal Arens
More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
Webcast: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=03df553d72e24a42812609633886ee281dLocation: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th Flr Conf Rms # 1135 & #1137, Marina Del Rey
WebCast Link: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=03df553d72e24a42812609633886ee281d
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- Greg Ver Steeg:
Fri, Nov 01, 2013 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Greg Ver Steeg, USC/ISI
Series: Natural Language Seminar
Abstract: Because natural language is complex, researchers in many domains look for lower-dimensional representations of text to suit their purposes. Different methods attempt to single out intuitive aspects of language like content, sentiment, or style. I will discuss a new, unsupervised approach to learning abstract representations of text (or other high-dimensional signals). The motivating principle is to use information theory to construct higher-order features that explain correlations between lower-order features. I will present preliminary results using this framework.
Biography: Greg Ver Steeg is a research professor at ISI. His research explores practical methods for inferring meaningful structure in complex systems like social networks. He did his PhD in quantum physics at Caltech.
Home Page:
http://www.isi.edu/people/gregv/about
Host: Yang Gao
More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th Flr Conf Rm # 1135, Marina Del Rey
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-Giuseppe Carenin:"Modeling Topics, Opinions and Discourse Structure in Asynchronous Conversations"
Fri, Nov 08, 2013 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Giuseppe Carenini, (University of British Columbia, Canada)
Talk Title: NL Seminar- "Modeling Topics, Opinions and Discourse Structure in Asynchronous Conversations"
Series: Natural Language Seminar
Abstract: Due to the Internet revolution, human conversational data--in written forms--are accumulating at a phenomenal rate, as more and more people engage in email exchanges, blogging, texting and other social media activities. In this talk, we will present automatic methods for analyzing conversational text generated in asynchronous conversations, i.e., where participants communicate with each other at different times (e.g., email, blog, forum). Our focus will be on novel techniques to detect the topics covered in the conversation, to identify whether an utterance in the conversation is expressing an opinion, as well as to determine the discourse structure of each message. In our work, we apply both graph-based methods and probabilistic graphical models.
Biography: Giuseppe is an Associate Professor in Computer Science at the University of British Columbia (BC, Canada). Giuseppe has broad interdisciplinary interests. His work on natural language processing and information visualization to support decision making has been published in over 90 peer-reviewed papers. Dr. Carenini was the area chair for “Sentiment Analysis, Opinion Mining, and Text Classification” of ACL 2009 and the area chair for “Summarization and Generation” of NAACL 2012. He has recently co-edited an ACM-TIST Special Issue on “Intelligent Visual Interfaces for Text Analysis”. In July 2011, he has published a co-authored book on “Methods for Mining and Summarizing Text Conversations”. In his work, Dr. Carenini has also extensively collaborated with industrial partners, including Microsoft and IBM. Giuseppe was awarded a Google Research Award and an IBM CASCON Best Exhibit Award in 2007 and 2010 respectively.
Host: Yang Gao
More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 6th Flr Conf Rm # 689, Marina Del Rey
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- Vikram Ramanarayanan: "Data-Driven Techniques for Modeling Speech Motor Control"
Fri, Nov 15, 2013 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Vikram Ramanarayanan , USC
Talk Title: "Data-Driven Techniques for Modeling Speech Motor Control"
Series: Natural Language Seminar
Abstract: Modeling the ways in which humans produce and perceive various forms of behavioral communication, such as speech, pose many diverse challenges. For instance, from a controls perspective, it is important to understand and model how control and coordination of various biological actuators in human body is achieved order to produce motor actions. From a signal processing perspective, we would like to discover novel representations or system architectures that are used in order to effect this coordination.
We present a computational, data-driven approach to derive interpretable movement primitives from speech articulation data in a bottom-up manner. It puts forth a convolutive Nonnegative Matrix Factorization algorithm with sparseness constraints (cNMFsc) to decompose a given data matrix into a set of spatio-temporal basis sequences and an activation matrix. The algorithm optimizes a cost function that trades off the mismatch between the proposed model and the input data against the number of primitives that are active at any given instant. We further argue that such primitives can be modeled using nonlinear dynamical systems in a control-theoretic framework for speech motor control. Specifically, we extend our approach to extract a spatio-temporal dictionary of control primitives (sequences of control parameters), which can then be used to control a dynamical systems model of the vocal tract to produce any desired sequence of movements. Although the method is particularly applied to measured and synthesized articulatory data in our case, the framework is general and can be applied to any multivariate timeseries. The results suggest that the proposed algorithm extracts movement primitives from human speech production data that are linguistically interpretable.
Biography: Home Page:
http://sail.usc.edu/~vramanar/
Host: Yang Gao
More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th Flr Conf Rm # 1135, Marina Del Rey
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.
