Events for December 02, 2016
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AI Seminar
Fri, Dec 02, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Thomas Lemberger, EMBO, Heidelberg, Germany
Talk Title: SourceData: a semantic platform to make published data and figures discoverable
Abstract: In scientific publications, data are visually depicted in figures or tables. The original data behind the figures the source data however are almost never available in a structured format that would make them findable and reusable. To address this issue, SourceData (http://sourcedata.embo.org) has built a suite of tools to capture the structure of published research data and to make published research papers discoverable based solely on their data content. SourceData converts the narrative descriptions provided in figure legends into standardized, machine readable metadata. Each biological component in a figure is consistently identified via links to established public databases of biological terms. The experimental design is furthermore captured in a structured format by classifying the role of each component. Computer assisted manual identification and classification of biological entities is performed with a web-based curation tool. A separate interface allows authors to verify the accuracy of curated information. In a pilot project, the SourceData team has processed over 15,000 experiments from papers across 23 journals. The resulting web of connected data can be browsed through the SmartFigure application (http://smartfigures.net), which displays data in the context of related figures published in other papers and enables users to easily navigate between them. Users can also use the SourceData search engine to directly retrieve data based on the design of an experiment. SourceData searches the structure of the data rather than relying on keyword indexing, thus avoiding potentially subjective interpretation of results provided in the text.
Biography: Thomas Lemberger is Deputy Head of Scientific Publications at EMBO (embo.org) in Heidelberg, Germany, Chief Editor of the open access journal Molecular Systems Biology (msb.embopress.org) and Project Leader of the SourceData project (sourcedata.embo.org). Trained as a molecular biologist, Thomas earned his PhD at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, where he studied hormonal regulation of gene expression by nuclear receptors. For his postdoctoral research, he moved to Heidelberg, Germany, where his research focused on the regulation of transcription in the brain. He joined EMBO as scientific editor in 2005 and assumed the editorial oversight of Molecular Systems Biology since launch of the journal. He has recently initiated the SourceData project to build an open platform that makes scientific publications discoverable based on their data content.
Host: Gully Burns
Location: 11th floor large conference room
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Kary LAU
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 PROCEDURAL LANGUAGE AND KNOWLEDGE
Fri, Dec 02, 2016 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Yejin Choi, University of Washington
Talk Title: PROCEDURAL LANGUAGE AND KNOWLEDGE
Series: Natural Language Seminar
Abstract: Various types of how to knowledge are encoded in natural language instructions: from setting up a tent, to preparing a dish for dinner, and to executing biology lab experiments. These types of instructions are based on procedural language, which poses unique challenges. For example, verbal arguments are commonly elided when they can be inferred from context, e.g.,bake for 30 minutes, not specifying bake what and where. Entities frequently merge and split, e.g.,vinegar and oil merging into dressing, creating challenges to reference resolution. And disambiguation often requires world knowledge, e.g., the implicit location argument of stir frying is on stove. In this talk, I will present our recent approaches to interpreting and composing cooking recipes that aim to address these challenges. In the first part of the talk, I will present an unsupervised approach to interpreting recipes as action graphs, which define what actions should be performed on which objects and in what order. Our work demonstrates that it is possible to recover action graphs without having access to gold labels, virtual environments or simulations. The key insight is to rely on the redundancy across different variations of similar instructions that provides the learning bias to infer various types of background knowledge, such as the typical sequence of actions applied to an ingredient, or how a combination of ingredients e.g., flour, milk, eggs becomes a new entity e.g, wet mixture . In the second part of the talk, I will present an approach to composing new recipes given a target dish name and a set of ingredients. The key challenge is to maintain global coherence while generating a goal-oriented text. We propose a Neural Checklist Model that attains global coherence by storing and updating a checklist of the agenda e.g., an ingredient list with paired attention mechanisms for tracking what has been already mentioned and what needs to be yet introduced. This model also achieves strong performance on dialogue system response generation. I will conclude the talk by discussing the challenges in modeling procedural language and acquiring the necessary background knowledge, pointing to avenues for future research.
Biography: Yejin Choi is an assistant professor at the Computer Science & Engineering Department of University of Washington. Her recent research focuses on language grounding, integrating language and vision, and modeling nonliteral meaning in text. She was among the IEEEs AI Top 10 to Watch in 2015 and a co-recipient of the Marr Prize at ICCV 2013. Her work on detecting deceptive reviews, predicting the literary success, and learning to interpret connotation has been featured by numerous media outlets including NBC News for New York, NPR Radio, New York Times, and Bloomberg Business Week. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science at Cornell University.
Host: Xing Shi and Kevin Knight
More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
Location: 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.
