[Colloquium] REMINDER: Talks at TTIC: Adam Lopez, Johns Hopkins University

[Dawn Ellis]

When:     Monday, February 3rd at 11am

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

Speaker:  Adam Lopez, Johns Hopkins University

Title:       A Formal Model of Semantics-Preserving Translation

Abstract:

Text rewriting applications like machine translation and summarization
model textual equivalence as probabilistic relations on strings.
Formally, most models are finite-state transducers or synchronous
context-free grammars, which express textual equivalence through
permutation or syntactic transformations, respectively. Today, there
is renewed interest in modeling equivalence through compositional
semantics. I will describe an approach to semantics-preserving string
rewriting based on combinatory categorial grammar (CCG), an elegant
formalism with a long history in formal language theory. CCG has many
attractive properties, including an elegant syntax-semantics interface
and efficient algorithms. The new formalism generates pairs of strings
with identical semantics. I will show how string pairs generated by
a synchronous CCG can be recognized using algorithms based on a
view of parsing as language intersection.

BIO: Adam Lopez works on problems at the intersection of algorithms,
machine learning, formal language theory, and computational linguistics
with applications to problems in natural language processing,
particularly machine translation. He is an assistant research professor
at Johns Hopkins University. He was previously a research fellow at the
University of Edinburgh, and earned his Ph.D. at the University of Maryland.

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
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