[Colloquium] REMINDER: Talks at TTIC: Yoav Artzi, University of Washington, Seattle

[Dawn Ellis]

When:     Wednesday, March 18, 2015 at 11am

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

Who:       Yoav Artzi, University of Washington, Seattle

Title:       Situated Learning and Understanding of Natural Language

Abstract:

Robust language understanding systems have the potential to transform how
we interact with computers. However, significant challenges in automated
reasoning and learning remain to be solved before we achieve this goal. To
accurately interpret user utterances, for example when instructing a robot,
a system must jointly reason about word meaning, grammatical structure,
conversation history and world state. Additionally, to learn without
prohibitive data annotation costs, systems must automatically make use of
weak, situated linguistic cues for autonomous language learning.

In this talk, I will present a framework that uses situated interactions to
learn to map sentences to rich, logical meaning representations. The
approach jointly induces the structure of a complex natural language
grammar and estimates its parameters, while relying on various learning
cues, such as easily gathered demonstrations and even raw conversations
without any additional annotation effort. It achieves state-of-the-art
performance on a number of tasks, including robotic interpretation of
navigational directions and learning to understand user utterances in
dialog systems. Such an approach, when integrated into complete systems,
has the potential to achieve continuous, autonomous learning by
participating in actual interactions with users.

Bio:

Yoav Artzi is a Ph.D. candidate in the Computer Science & Engineering
department at the University of Washington, Seattle. His research interests
are in the intersection of natural language processing and machine
learning. In particular, he focuses on designing latent variable learning
algorithms that recover rich representations of linguistic meaning for
situated natural language understanding. He completed a B.Sc. summa cum
laude in Computer Science in Tel Aviv University, and is a recipient of the
2014 Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship and the 2012 Yahoo Key Scientific
Challenge award.


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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