[Colloquium] FW: Correction: Guest Speakers @ TTI-C THIS Week(2/27/06-3/3/06)

[Katherine Cumming]

***Schedule Change***
T
Speaker: Tong Zhang, Yahoo 
Date:  Friday, March 3, 2006
Time:  12:00 noon
Location:  TTI-C Conference Room
Speaker's home page:  <http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~tzhang/>
http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~tzhang/
 
Title:  Learning with Structured Inputs
Abstract:
I will present a novel approach to semi-supervised learning that employs a
method, which we refer to as structural learning (aka multi-task learning).

The idea is to learn predictive structures from many auxiliary problems that
are created from the unlabeled data (and are related to the target problem),
and then transfer the learned structure to the supervised target problem.
In the first part, I will give a high-level description of the general
approach, a specific bi-linear structure model we use, and then explain how
we generate auxiliary problems that are related to the target task.  I will
then show some empirical results.  For example, this method produces
performance higher than the previous best results on some standard NLP
benchmark tests.  It is also highly effective for some other problems such
as image classification and even information retrieval.  In particular, I
will describe our successful participation in 2005's TREC genomics ad hoc
retrieval task using this idea.

In the second part, I will present a general framework for learning
structures including its learning theoretical analysis.  Under this
framework, I will investigate the theoretical justification of the bi-linear
structure model used in our experiments, and show that the resulting
formulation can be solved by an iterative SVD procedure.  The relationship
of this framework and transfer learning, and Bayesian hierarchical models
will be discussed.
 
 
 
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If you have questions, or would like to meet the speaker, please contact
Katherine at 773-834-1994 or kcumming at tti-c.org.   
For information on future TTI-C talks and events, please go to the TTI-C
Events page:  http://www.tti-c.org/events.html.  TTI-C (1427 East 60th
Street, Chicago, IL  60637)
 
 
 
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