[nl-uiuc] Talk by Hal Daume III at 2 pm, 3405 SC.

[Rajhans Samdani]

Hi All,

This is a gentle reminder for Hal Daume's talk in the AIIS seminar (today, 2 pm, 3405 SC).

Here are title, abstract, and bio.

Title:
Structure and Knowledge in Natural Language Processing

Abstract:
Human language exhibits complex structure.  To be successful, machine learning approaches to language-related problems must be able to take advantage of this structure.  I will discuss several investigations into the relationship between structure and learning, which have led to some surprising conclusions about the role that structure plays in language processing.  From there, I will consider the question of: where does this structure come from.  By taking insights from linguistic typology, I will show that very simple typological information can lead to significant increases in system performance for some simple syntactic problems.  Moreover, I will show how this typological information can be mined from raw data.

(This talk includes joint work with Dan Klein, John Langford, Percy
Liang, Daniel Marcu, and some of my students: Arvind Agarwal, Adam Teichert and Piyush Rai.)

Bio:
Hal Daume III is an assistant professor in the School of Computing at the University of Utah. His primary research interests are in understanding how to get human knowledge into a machine learning system in the most efficient way possible. In practice, he works primarily in the areas of Bayesian learning (particularly non-parametric methods), structured prediction and domain adaptation (with a focus on problems in language and biology). He associates himself most with conferences like ACL, ICML, NIPS and EMNLP. He earned his PhD at the University of Southern Californian with a thesis on structured prediction for language (his advisor was Daniel Marcu). He spent the summer of 2003 working with Eric Brill in the machine learning and applied statistics group at Microsoft Research. Prior to that, he studied math (mostly logic) at Carnegie Mellon University. He still likes math and doesn't like to use C (instead he uses O'Caml or Haskell). He doesn't like shoes, but does like act!
 iv!
ities that are hard on your feet: skiing, badminton, Aikido and rock climbing.

Thanks!
Regards,
Rajhans 


Rajhans Samdani,
Graduate Student,
Dept. of Computer Science,
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.