[Colloquium] REMINDER: 3/6 Talks at TTIC: Yonatan Bisk, USC

[Mary Marre via Colloquium]

When:     Monday, March 6th at 11:00 am

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

Who:       Yonatan Bisk, USC


Title:       The Limits of Unsupervised Syntax and the Importance of
Grounding in Language Acquisition

Abstract: The future of self-driving cars, personal robots, smart homes,
and intelligent assistants hinges on our ability to communicate with
computers. The failures and miscommunications of Siri-style systems are
untenable and become more problematic as machines become more pervasive and
are given more control over our lives. Despite the creation of massive
proprietary datasets to train dialogue systems, these systems still fail at
the most basic tasks. Further, their reliance on big data is problematic.
First, successes in English cannot be replicated in most of the 6,000+
languages of the world. Second, while big data has been a boon for
supervised training methods, many of the most interesting tasks will never
have enough labeled data to actually achieve our goals. It is therefore
important that we build systems which can learn from naturally occurring
data and grounded situated interactions.

In this talk, I will discuss work from my thesis on the unsupervised
acquisition of syntax which harnesses unlabeled text in over a dozen
languages. This exploration leads us to novel insights into the limits of
semantics-free language learning. Having isolated these stumbling blocks,
I’ll then present my recent work on language grounding where we attempt to
learn the meaning of several linguistic constructions via interaction with
the world.

Bio: Yonatan Bisk’s research focuses on Natural Language Processing from
naturally occurring data (unsupervised and weakly supervised data). He is a
postdoc researcher with Daniel Marcu at USC’s Information Sciences
Institute. Previously, he received his Ph.D. from the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign under Julia Hockenmaier and his BS from the
University of Texas at Austin.


Host: Kevin Gimpel <kgimpel 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>*

On Mon, Feb 27, 2017 at 5:14 PM, Mary Marre <mmarre at ttic.edu> wrote:

> When:     Monday, March 6th at 11:00 am
>
> Where:    TTIC, 6045 S Kenwood Avenue, 5th Floor, Room 526
>
> Who:       Yonatan Bisk, USC
>
>
> Title:        The Limits of Unsupervised Syntax and the Importance of
> Grounding in Language Acquisition
>
> Abstract: The future of self-driving cars, personal robots, smart homes,
> and intelligent assistants hinges on our ability to communicate with
> computers. The failures and miscommunications of Siri-style systems are
> untenable and become more problematic as machines become more pervasive and
> are given more control over our lives. Despite the creation of massive
> proprietary datasets to train dialogue systems, these systems still fail at
> the most basic tasks. Further, their reliance on big data is problematic.
> First, successes in English cannot be replicated in most of the 6,000+
> languages of the world. Second, while big data has been a boon for
> supervised training methods, many of the most interesting tasks will never
> have enough labeled data to actually achieve our goals. It is therefore
> important that we build systems which can learn from naturally occurring
> data and grounded situated interactions.
>
> In this talk, I will discuss work from my thesis on the unsupervised
> acquisition of syntax which harnesses unlabeled text in over a dozen
> languages. This exploration leads us to novel insights into the limits of
> semantics-free language learning. Having isolated these stumbling blocks,
> I’ll then present my recent work on language grounding where we attempt to
> learn the meaning of several linguistic constructions via interaction with
> the world.
>
> Bio: Yonatan Bisk’s research focuses on Natural Language Processing from
> naturally occurring data (unsupervised and weakly supervised data). When:
>     Monday, March 6th at 11:00 am
>
>
>
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