Quantum Information Flow Made Classical: New Mathematics for Natural Language Compositionality

======================================================================
                Joint Seminar
======================================================================
The Hong Kong University of Science & Technology
Human Language Technology Center
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering
---------------------------------------------------------------------

Speaker:        Edward GREFENSTETTE
                Department of Computer Science
                Oxford University

Title:          "Quantum Information Flow Made Classical:
                 New Mathematics for Natural Language Compositionality"

Date:           Monday, 2 September 2013

Time:           4:00pm - 5:00pm

Venue:          Lecture Theater F (near lifts 25 & 26), HKUST

Abstract:

Over the past few years, work bringing together the research interests of
members of Oxford's Computational Linguistics Group and Quantum Group have
yielded a generalisation of Montague Grammar's interaction between syntax
and semantics to other syntactic formalisms and algebraic semantic
representations. In particular, recent work has explored how syntactically
conditioned models of compositional distributional semantics could be
derived, and learned from data. In this talk, I will give a brief overview
of this line of research, before offering some (very open ended) thoughts
on the direction future work might take. No knowledge of particularly
fancy mathematics (e.g. category theory) is expected, as all the technical
bits will be explained through the medium of (hopefully) pretty pictures.


*******************
Biography:

Ed GREFENSTETTE is a Franco-American computer scientist. He recently
finished a doctorate at the University of Oxford's Department of Computer
Science under the supervision of Bob Coecke, Stephen Pulman and Mehrnoosh
Sadrzadeh. He now works as a researcher in the same department, and
teaches computer science and philosophy at Hertford College, where he is a
lecturer. He is also a Fulford Junior Research Fellow at Somerville
College. His main research interests are tensor-based models of semantics,
applied category theory, and mathematical linguistics.