Broad Area Colloquium For AI-Geometry-Graphics-Robotics-Vision
The Statistical Natural Language Processing Revolution
Eugene Charniak
Professor of Computer Science and Cognitive Science
Brown University
Wednesday, April 26, 2000
refreshments 4:05PM, talk begins 4:15PM
TCseq201, Lecture Hall B
http://robotics.stanford.edu/ba-colloquium/
Abstract
Over the last ten years or so the field of natural language processing
(NLP) has become increasingly dominated by corpus-based methods and
statistical techniques. In this research, problems are attacked by
collecting statistics from a corpus (sometimes marked with correct
answers, sometimes not) and then applying the statistics to new
instances of the task. In this talk we give an overview of
statistical techniques in a few areas of NLP such as: parsing (finding
the correct phrase structure for a sentence), lexical semantics
(learning meanings and other properties of words and phrases from
text), and anaphora resolution (determining the intended antecedent of
pronouns, and noun phrases in general). As a general rule,
corpus-based, and particularly statistical techniques outperform
hand-crafted systems, and the rate of progress in the field is quite
high.
About the Speaker
Eugene Charniak is Professor of Computer Science and Cognitive Science
at Brown University and past chair of the Department of Computer
Science. He received his A.B. degree in Physics from University of
Chicago, and a Ph.D. from M.I.T. in Computer Science. He has
published four books: Computational Semantics, with Yorick Wilks
(1976) Artificial Intelligence Programming with Chris Riesbeck, Drew
McDermott, and James Meehan (1980, 1987), Introduction to Artificial
Intelligence with Drew McDermott (1985) and Statistical Language
Learning (1993). He is a Fellow of the American Association of
Artificial Intelligence and was previously a Councilor of the
organization. His research has always been in the area of language
understanding or technologies which relate to it. Over the last few
years he has been interested in statistical techniques for language
processing. In this area he has worked in the sub-areas of
lexicalized parsing, pronoun-reference, and lexical resource
acquisition, all through statistical means.
bac-coordinators@cs.stanford.edu
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Mon Jan 10 14:05:01 PST 2000