Events Calendar

Special NL Seminar-Jerry Hobbs :

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=03df553d72e24a42812609633886ee281d

Location: 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/