[Colloquium] REMINDER: TTIC Colloquium: Percy Liang, Stanford

[Dawn Ellis]

 When:     Monday, Sept. 15th at 11am

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

Who:       Percy Liang, Stanford

Title:       Semantic Parsing, Latent Variables, and Inference

Today, the tremendous growth of semi-structured data far outpaces our
ability to ask interesting deep questions of it.  In the first part of
this talk, I will entertain the possibility of using natural language
as a universal and agile interface for querying, and more generally
computing with, data.  Specifically, I will discuss two recent
projects: (i) learning to map natural language questions into database
queries on Freebase; and (ii) learning to map natural language queries
onto XPath expressions that extract entities from web pages.

The applications above are quite demanding in that the require both
non-convex optimization of latent-variable models and solving hard
inference problems.  In the second part of the talk, I will give an
overview of our recent work on addressing these fundamental issues.
In particular: (i) using tensor decomposition to obtain globally
consistent parameter estimates for a broad class of "bottlenecked">
graphical models with latent variables; and (ii) using "abstract
particles" for approximate inference which combines the precision of
particle based methods with the coverage of variational methods.

Host:  Mohit Bansal, mbansal 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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