Structure and Knowledge in Natural Language Processing

Harold Daume III
Assistant Professor at University of Utah will be giving a talk on Tuesday, November 3, 2009 at 10:00 a.m. in room 2460.

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.)