ColloquiaTalk by KEVIN KNIGHT on January 8th

[mtrimble at uchicago.edu]

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TOYOTA TECHNOLOGICAL INSTITUTE 
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Date: Wednesday, January 8th, 2003 

Time: 2:30 p.m. 

Place: Ryerson Hall 251 

Speaker: KEVIN KNIGHT, Senior Research Scientist 
USC/Information Sciences Institute

title: What's New in Statistical Machine Translation 

abstract:  A lot of knowledge of how to do language translation is implicit 
in people's heads.  It is tough to extract that knowledge and to encode it 
in algorithmic form.  On the other hand, there is also a lot of translation 
knowledge implicit in large quantities of human-translated material 
(available, for example, from the United Nations).  I will talk about some 
recent work aimed at extracting this knowledge through automatic machine 
learning techniques. 

bio: Kevin Knight is a Senior Research Scientist at the USC/Information 
Sciences Institute.  He is also a Research Associate Professor in the 
Computer Science Department at USC.  He received his Ph.D. from Carnegie 
Mellon University in 1991 and his BA from Harvard University in 1986.  He 
is co-author of the textbook Artificial Intelligence.  His main research 
interests are statistical natural language processing, machine translation, 
natural language generation, and decipherment. 

*Refreshments will be served after the talk in Ryerson 255* 

If you wish to meet with the speaker, please send e-mail to Meridel Trimble 
mtrimble at uchicago.edu