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Events for May 16, 2019

  • NL Seminar-THE BLOCKS WORLD REDUX

    Thu, May 16, 2019 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Information Sciences Institute

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Martha Palmer , Univ of Colorado

    Talk Title: THE BLOCKS WORLD REDUX

    Series: Natural Language Seminar

    Abstract: This talk will discuss some of the challenges arising from the Blocks World scenario in the DARPA Communicating with Computers program. The actions are very simple and concrete, such as Add a block to the tower. However, even in this restricted world, getting the appropriate contextual interpretation of a sentence can be challenging, especially with respect to spatial relations. The talk will review the progress we have made so far on collecting useful data and attempting to achieve the goal of contextual interpretation. To do this we bring to bear many resources, ranging from AMR parsing to Jerry Hobbs's axiomatization of object and action definitions, to our recent merger of James Pustejovsky's Generative Lexicon GL, and VerbNet VN, i.e., GL VN. A main focus of the talk will be the ways in which we are expanding AMR annotation to encompass spatial relations and also the recovery of implicit arguments. Both expansions play into the task of maintaining a discourse structure. The talk will conclude with both short term and long term goals for our collaborations on CwC, with respect to both AMR and GL-VN.



    Biography: Martha Palmer is the Helen & Hubert Croft Endowed Professor of Engineering in the Computer Science Department, and an Arts & Sciences Professor of Distinction in the Linguistics Department, at the University of Colorado, with a split appointment. She is also an Institute of Cognitive Science Faculty Fellow, a co Director of CLEAR and an Association of Computational Linguistics ACL Fellow. She won an Outstanding Graduate Advisor 2014 Award, a Boulder Faculty Assembly 2010 Research Award and was the Director of the 2011 Linguistics Institute in Boulder, CO. Her research is focused on capturing elements of the meanings of words that can comprise automatic representations of complex sentences and documents in English, Chinese, Arabic, Hindi, and Urdu, funded by DARPA and NSF. A more recent focus is the application of these methods to biomedical journal articles and clinical notes, funded by NIH, and the geo and bio sciences, funded by NSF. She co edits LiLT, Linguistic Issues in Language Technology, and has been a co editor of the Journal of Natural Language Engineering and on the CLJ Editorial Board. She is a past President of ACL, past Chair of SIGLEX, was the Founding Chair of SIGHAN, and has well over 250 peer reviewed publications.

    Host: Xusen Yin

    More Info: https://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar

    Webcast: https://bluejeans.com/s/ny0H5

    Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - CR #689

    WebCast Link: https://bluejeans.com/s/ny0H5

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Peter Zamar

    Event Link: https://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar

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