[nl-uiuc] Upcoming talk at the AIIS seminar (this Thursday).

[Alexandre Klementiev]

Dear faculty and students,

Jacob Eisenstein, who has been offered a 2008 Beckman Postdoctoral Fellow
appointment, will give a talk (details below) at the AIIS seminar this
Thursday.  Student meeting with Jacob is scheduled for 2:30pm on March 6th
in 3403 SC.

Thank you,
 Alex

Title: * Giving Discourse Processing a Hand: Gesture cues for Discourse
Structure *
Speaker: * **Jacob Eisenstein, MIT*
Date: Mar. 6th, 4:00pm
Location: Siebel 3405

Abstract:

Computers cannot fully understand spoken language without access to the wide
range of modalities that accompany speech. My research addresses the
particularly expressive modality of hand gesture, and focuses on building
structured statistical models at the intersection of speech, vision, and
meaning. While individual gestures may be idiosyncratic and thus difficult
to interpret, we can still leverage gesture to improve language
understanding by identifying patterns between gestures, and hypothesizing
similar patterns in the meaning of the associated speech. I will describe
successful applications of this idea to resolve ambiguous noun phrases,
improve topic segmentation, and create keyframe summaries of spoken
language.

Bio:

Jacob Eisenstein is in the final year of his PhD studies at MIT, supervised
by Regina Barzilay and Randall Davis.  His research interests include
statistical natural language processing, multimodal interaction, and
applications of computer vision.
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