Events Calendar

NL Seminar-Modeling American Sign Language via Linguistic Knowledge Infusion

Speaker: Lee Kezar, USC

Talk Title: Modeling American Sign Language via Linguistic Knowledge Infusion

Series: NL Seminar

Abstract: REMINDER: Meeting hosts only admit on-line guests that they know to the Zoom meeting. Hence, you’re highly encouraged to use your USC account to sign into Zoom. If you’re an outside visitor, please inform us at (nlg-seminar-host(at)isi.edu) to make us aware of your attendance so we can admit you. Specify if you will attend remotely or in person at least one business day prior to the event  Provide your: full name, job title and professional affiliation and arrive at least 10 minutes before the seminar begins. If you do not have access to the 6th Floor for in-person attendance, please check in at the 10th floor main reception desk to register as a visitor and someone will escort you to the conference room location. ZOOM INFO: https://usc.zoom.us/j/92497567208?pwd=nWwbWeA3dKwYIjObiFJPxqmwbXb9p9.1 Meeting ID: 924 9756 7208 Passcode: 329410 ABSTRACT: As language technologies rapidly gain popularity and utility, many of the 70 million deaf and hard-of-hearing people who prefer a sign language are left behind. While NLP research into American Sign Language (ASL) is gaining popularity, we continue to face serious challenges like data scarcity and low engagement with ASL users and experts. This presentation will cover how ASL models strongly benefit from neuro-symbolically learning the linguistic structure of signs, yielding gains with respect to their data efficiency, explainability, and generalizability. Concretely, we show that phonological, morphological, and semantic knowledge "infusion" can increase sign recognition accuracy by 30%, enable few- and zero-shot sign understanding, reduce sensitivity to signer demographics, and address longstanding research questions in sign language phonology and language acquisition.

Biography: Lee Kezar (he/they) is fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, advised by Jesse Thomason in the Grounding Language in Actions, Multimodal Observations, and Robotics (GLAMOR) Lab. Their research blends computational, linguistic, and psychological models of ASL to increase access to language technologies and advance theoretical perspectives on signing and co-speech gesture. Read more at https://leekezar.github.io

Host: Jonathan May and Katy Felkner

More Info: https://www.isi.edu/research-groups-nlg/nlg-seminars/

Webcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INxlzzNtwI4

Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - Conf Rm#689

WebCast Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INxlzzNtwI4

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Pete Zamar

Event Link: https://www.isi.edu/research-groups-nlg/nlg-seminars/