Events Calendar

NL Seminar- Dialogue focus tracking for zero pronoun resolution

Speaker: Sudha Rao, Univ of Maryland / USC ISI Intern

Talk Title: Dialogue focus tracking for zero pronoun resolution

Series: Natural Language Seminar

Abstract: We take a novel approach to zero pronoun resolution in Chinese: our model explicitly tracks the flow of focus in a discourse. Our approach, which generalizes to deictic references, is not reliant on the presence of overt noun phrase antecedents to resolve to, and allows us to address the large percentage of -non-anaphoric- pronouns filtered out in other approaches. We furthermore train our model using readily available parallel Chinese/English corpora, allowing for training without hand-annotated data. Our results demonstrate improvements on two test sets, as well as the usefulness of linguistically motivated features.


Biography: I am a PhD student from University of Maryland, College Park working under Prof. Hal Daume III and Prof. Philip Resnik. My recent project on "Dialogue focus tracking for zero pronoun resolution" appeared at NAACL 2015. At ISI, I am working with Prof. Daniel Marcu and Prof. Kevin Knight on application of Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) to biology literature. Specifically we will be developing techniques for constructing text level AMRs from sentence level AMRs and then assess its impact on reading-against-a-model molecular biology tasks. In my spare time, I enjoy singing, dancing and watching movies.

Host: Nima Pourdamghani and Kevin Knight

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/