[Colloquium] 9/28 TTIC Young Researcher Seminar Series: Jacob Andreas, Berkeley

[Mary Marre via Colloquium]

When:     Wednesday, September 28th at 11am

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

Who:       Jacob Andreas, University of California, Berkeley


Title: Modular neural architectures for grounded language learning

Abstract:
Language understanding depends on two abilities: an ability to translate
between natural language utterances and abstract representations of
meaning, and an ability to relate such meaning representations to the
perceived world. In the natural language processing literature, these tasks
are respectively known as "semantic parsing" and "grounding", and have been
treated as essentially independent problems. In this talk, I will present
two modular neural architectures for jointly learning to ground language in
the world and reason about it compositionally.

I will first describe a technique that uses syntactic information to
dynamically construct neural networks from composable primitives. The
resulting structures, called "neural module networks", can be used to
achieve state-of-the-art results on a variety of grounded question
answering tasks. Next, I will present a model for contextual referring
expression generation, in which contrastive behavior results from a
combination of learned semantics and inference-driven pragmatics. This
model is again backed by modular neural components---in this case
elementary listener and speaker representations. It is able to successfully
complete a challenging referring expression generation task, exhibiting
pragmatic behavior without ever observing such behavior at training time. I
will conclude by outlining possible applications of this framework to
control and planning problems.

Host: Kevin Gimpel, kgimpel at ttic.edu


*************************



The TTIC Young Researcher Seminar Series (http://www.ttic.edu/young-
researcher.php) features talks by Ph.D. students and postdocs whose research is
of broad interest to the computer science community. The series provides an
opportunity for early-career researchers to present recent work to and meet
with students and faculty at TTIC and nearby universities.


The seminars are typically held on Wednesdays at 11:00am in TTIC Room 526.

For additional information, please contact Matthew Walter (mwalter at ttic.edu
).




Mary C. Marre
Administrative Assistant
*Toyota Technological Institute*
*6045 S. Kenwood Avenue*
*Room 504*
*Chicago, IL  60637*
*p:(773) 834-1757*
*f: (773) 357-6970*
*mmarre at ttic.edu <mmarre at ttic.edu>*
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