[Colloquium] TTIC Colloquium: Dan Roth, UIUC

[Liv Leader]

When:     Tuesday, February 21 @ 1 p.m.

Where:   TTIC Conference Room #530, 6045 S. Kenwood Avenue, 5th Floor

Who:      Dan Roth, UIUC

Title:       Learning from Natural Instructions

Abstract:

Machine learning is traditionally formalized as the study of learning
concepts and decision functions from labeled examples, thus requiring
representations that encode information about the target function’s
domain.  We are interested in providing a way for a human teacher to
interact with an automated learner using natural instructions which
communicate relevant domain expertise to the learner without necessarily
knowing a thing about the internal representation or the learning program.

This talk focuses on the machine learning aspects of this problem. The key
challenge is to learn natural language interpretations without being given
direct supervision at that level; for example, a plausible feedback could
be the success or failure of the performed instruction.

We will present research on Constrained Conditional Models (CCMs), a
framework that augments probabilistic models with declarative constraints
in order to support learning such interpretations. In CCMs we formulate
natural language interpretation problems as Integer Linear Programs and
learning of the objective functions is done via constraints-driven learning
and through global inference that account for the interdependencies among
interpretation’s components.  In particular, we will focus on new
algorithms for training these global models using easy-to-get indirect
supervision signals and show the contribution of indirect supervision to
other NLP tasks such as Information Extraction, Transliteration and Textual
Entailment.

Short Bio:

Dan Roth is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and the
Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a
University of Illinois Scholar. He is the director of a DHS Center for
Multimodal Information Access & Synthesis (MIAS) and also has faculty
positions in Statistics, Linguistics and at the School of Library and
Information Sciences.

Host: Greg Shakhnarovich, greg at ttic.edu




-- 
Liv Leader
Human Resources Coordinator

Toyota Technological Institute Chicago
6045 S Kenwood Ave
Chicago, IL 60637
Phone- (773) 702-5033
Fax-     (773) 834-9881
Email-  lleader at ttic.edu <jam at ttic.edu>
Web-   www.ttic.edu
<http://www.ttic.edu/>
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