Events Calendar

AI Seminar- Adam Lopez

Speaker: Adam Lopez, Johns Hopkins University

Series: Artificial Intelligence Seminar

Abstract: A decade ago, students arrived at universities having been exposed to the idea of machine translation (MT) primarily through science fiction. Today, services like Google Translate have made it science fact. It is increasingly taught in courses and has its own textbook. But since it's a real application that isn't fully perfected, the best way to learn about it is still to build an MT system. Unfortunately, popular open-source toolkits for MT are mature codebases featuring tens of thousands of source code lines, making it difficult to focus on their core algorithms. Most tutorials present them as black boxes. But we want students to understand these algorithms, and black boxes are incompatible with this goal.

As a centerpiece of our MT course, we challenged students to obtain the best performance on carefully constrained instances of four key MT problems, each corresponding to key problems in AI: alignment (unsupervised learning), decoding (search), evaluation, and reranking (supervised learning). We provided concise, fully-functioning, self-contained baseline components in less than 150 lines of python. Students brought a diverse arsenal of ideas to the problems, some novel. A surprising and exciting outcome was that student solutions or their combinations fared competitively on some tasks, suggesting that even novices could help improve the state-of-the-art on hard AI problems while simultaneously learning a great deal.

Biography: Adam Lopez works on problems at the intersection of algorithms, machine learning, formal language theory, and computational linguistics with applications to problems in natural language processing, particularly machine translation. He is an assistant research professor at Johns Hopkins University. Previously he was a research fellow at the University of Edinburgh after earning a Ph.D. from the University of Maryland. This summer he is a visiting scientist at SDL Research.

Home Page:
http://www.cs.jhu.edu/~alopez/

Host: David Chiang

Webcast: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=ea55185170054e13972a0ea5b932eb6c1d

Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - Marina Del Rey-6th Flr Conf Rm # 689

WebCast Link: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=ea55185170054e13972a0ea5b932eb6c1d

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Peter Zamar