Events Calendar

AI Seminar-Metaphor: Linguistic Anthropology Meets Computational Linguistics

Speaker: Jerry Hobbs and Suzanne Wertheim, USC/ISI

Talk Title: Metaphor: Linguistic Anthropology Meets Computational Linguistics

Series: Artificial Intelligence Seminar

Abstract: Metaphors are more than just colorful or poetic linguistic expressions. They are also cognitive models that permeate both thought and speech, comparing categories and scenarios, and contributing to the shared set of understandings that we commonly refer to as “culture.” The MICS project, led by ISI since 2011, has been researching and creating solutions to problems posed by natural language processing of metaphor. When in Year 3 of the program, the focus was shifted from automatic metaphor identification and categorization to automated cross-cultural comparisons, computer science alone was not enough to solve the problems posed by the new tasking. In this talk, we will describe the collaboration between linguistic anthropology and computational linguistics that resulted both in a new theoretical framework of metaphorical structure and in a successful end-to-end system that produces meaningful category comparisons with minimal human interference.



Biography: Jerry Hobbs Bio:

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 a Chief Scientist. 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.

Suzanne Wertheim Bio:
Since completing her Ph.D. at Berkeley, Suzanne Wertheim has taught both linguistics and linguistic anthropology at Northwestern, Georgetown, and UCLA. Dr. Wertheim has been collaborating with computer scientists since 2007, and in 2011, she founded Worthwhile Research & Consulting, which specializes in research involving language and culture. Her research interests include the intersection of linguistic anthropology and AI; intercultural communication; bilingualism; and language and gender.

Host: Ashish Vaswani

Webcast: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=67b78c7d28ce4e0da1029e7af24445d81d

Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th Flr Conf Rm # 1135, Marina Del Rey

WebCast Link: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=67b78c7d28ce4e0da1029e7af24445d81d

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Peter Zamar