Month: January 2016

Please join us for the next NLP Seminar on Thursday January 28 at 4pm in 205 South Hall. All are welcome!

Speaker: Greg Durrett (UC Berkeley)

Title: Harnessing Big Data for Text Analysis with Joint Models

Abstract:
One reason that analyzing text is hard is that it involves dealing with deeply entangled linguistic variables: objects like syntactic structures, semantic types, and discourse relations depend on one another in complex ways. Our work uses joint modeling approaches to tackle several facets of text analysis, combining model components both across and within subtasks. This model structure allows us to pass information between these entangled subtasks and propagate high-confidence predictions rather than errors. Critically, our models have the capacity to learn key linguistic phenomena as well as other important patterns in the data; that is, linguistics tells us how to structure these models, then the data injects knowledge into them. We describe state-of-the-art systems for a range of tasks, including syntactic parsing, entity analysis, and document summarization.

We’ll be meeting Spring semester at the same time and same location: alternating Thursdays at 4pm, 205 South Hall.

Our schedule is:

Greg Durrett (Jan 28)
Angel Chang (Feb 11)
David Mimno (Feb 25)
Justine Kao (Mar 10)
Spring Break (Mar 24)
Percy Liang (Apr 7)
Dan Gillick (Apr 21)