[Colloquium] Talks at TTIC

[Dawn Ellis]

When:  Thursday, April 11th at 11am

Where: TTIC - 6045 S. Kenwood Ave.  Room 526

Speaker:  Alan Ritter (University of Washington)


Title: Extracting Knowledge from Informal Text

Abstract:
The internet has revolutionized the way we communicate, leading to a
constant flood of informal text available in electronic format, including:
email, Twitter, SMS and also informal text produced in professional
environments such as the clinical text found in electronic medical records.
 This presents a big opportunity for Natural Language Processing (NLP) and
Information Extraction (IE) technology to enable new large scale
data-analysis applications by extracting machine-processable information
from unstructured text at scale.

In this talk I will discuss several challenges and opportunities which
arise when applying NLP and IE to informal text, focusing specifically on
Twitter, which has recently rose to prominence, challenging the mainstream
news media as the dominant source of realtime information on current
events.  I will describe several NLP tools we have adapted to handle
Twitter’s noisy style, and present a system which leverages these to
automatically extract a calendar of popular events occurring in the near
future (http://statuscalendar.cs.washington.edu).

I will further discuss fundamental challenges which arise when extracting
meaning from such massive open-domain text corpora.  Several probabilistic
latent variable models will be presented, which are applied to infer the
semantics of large numbers of words and phrases and also enable a
principled and modular approach to extracting knowledge from large
open-domain text corpora.

Bio:
Alan Ritter is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer Science and
Engineering at the University of Washington.  His interests include NLP in
short informal messages (e.g. Twitter), modeling lexical semantics with
latent variables, modeling conversations in social media and paraphrasing
between different styles of language (for example translating Shakespeare’s
plays, or noisy Twitter text into standard English and vice versa).  He was
awarded an NDSEG fellowship, and won the best student paper award at IUI in
2009.


-- 
*Dawn Ellis*
Administrative Assistant
773-834-1757
dellis at ttic.edu

TTIC
6045 S. Kenwood Ave.
Chicago, IL. 60637
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