[Colloquium] Talks at TTIC: Kai-Wei Chang, UIUC

[Dawn Ellis]

When:     Monday, April 13th at 11am

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

Who:       Kai-Wei Chang, UIUC

Title:       Practical Learning Algorithms for Structured Prediction Models

Abstract:

The desired output in many machine learning tasks is a structured
object such as a tree, a clustering of nodes, or a sequence. Learning
accurate prediction models for such problems requires training on
large amounts of data, making use of expressive features and
performing global inference that simultaneously assigns values to all
interrelated nodes in the structure. All these contribute to
significant scalability problems. We describe a collection of results
that address several aspects of these problems – by carefully
selecting and caching samples, structures, or latent items.

Our results lead to efficient learning algorithms for structured
prediction models and for online clustering models which, in turn,
support reduction in problem size, improvements in training and
evaluation speed and improved performance. We have used our algorithms
to learn expressive models from large amounts of annotated data and
achieve state-of-the art performance on several natural language
processing tasks.


Bio:

Kai-Wei Chang is a doctoral candidate advised by Prof. Dan Roth in the
Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign. His research interests lie in designing practical
machine learning techniques for large and complex data and applying
them to real world applications. He has been working on various topics
in Machine learning and Natural Language Processing, including
large-scale learning, structured learning, coreference resolution, and
relation extraction. Kai-Wei was awarded the KDD Best Paper Award
(2010), the Yahoo! Key Scientific Challenges Award (2011), and the
C.L. and Jane W-S. Liu Award (2013) from the Department of Computer
Science at UIUC.

Host:  Greg Shakhnarovich, greg 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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