[Colloquium] REMINDER! Talks at TTIC: February 5th at 11am! Jackie Cheung, Univ of Toronto

[Dawn Ellis]

When:     Wednesday, February 5th, at 11am

Where:    TTIC, 6045 S Kenwood Avenue, 5th Floor, Room #526

Speaker:  Jackie Cheung, University of Toronto

Title:       Ready for Primetime: Distributional Semantics for Complex Text
                            Applications

Abstract:

Large text collections contain information that could facilitate decision
and policy making, or even suggest new hypotheses to test. However, to
effectively use this text requires semantic analysis, in order to abstract
it to a form that can be further analyzed and reasoned with. In this talk,
I show that distributional semantics (DS) can be the semantic formalism
that fills this role. DS takes the view that the meanings of words or
phrases can be modeled by the contexts in which they appear in a large
training corpus. First, I introduce a novel evaluation framework for DS at
the sentence level that tests whether DS models correctly abstract
different ways of expressing a semantic relation into similar semantic
representations. In other words, it tests whether they recognize argument
structure invariance, a crucial prerequisite for performing inference over
text. Then, I present Distributional Semantic Hidden Markov Models (DSHMM),
a probabilistic graphical model that integrates phrasal DS representations
into its statistical inference and learning algorithms. In experiments on
template induction and multi-document summarization, DSHMM outperforms
previous state-of-the-art systems that do not use DS information. These
results demonstrate the potential of DS as the core semantic formalism in
complex text applications.

Bio:
Jackie CK Cheung is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto. His
research interests span several areas of natural language processing,
including computational semantics, automatic summarization, and natural
language generation. His work is supported by the Natural Sciences and
Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), as well as a Facebook
Fellowship.

Host:  Karen Livescu, klivescu at ttic.edu


-- 
*Dawn Ellis*
Administrative Coordinator,
Bookkeeper
773-834-1757
dellis at ttic.edu

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



-- 
*Dawn Ellis*
Administrative Coordinator,
Bookkeeper
773-834-1757
dellis at ttic.edu

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