Small Models for Natural Language Processing

========================================================================
                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:	Professor Kevin KNIGHT
		Information Sciences Institute
		University of Southern California

Title:		"Small Models for Natural Language Processing"

Date:		Wednesday, 25 March 2009

Time:		4:00pm -5:00pm

Venue:		Lecture Theater G
		(Chow Tak Sin Lecture Theater, near lifts 25/26)
		HKUST

Abstract:

Occam's Razor says that the simplest explanation is the best, all other
things being equal. This principle is well known to linguists, who strive
for small, elegant models of human language.  In natural language
processing, minimal models are less often pursued.  This talk explores how
to explicitly optimize model size for the problems of word alignment and
part-of-speech tagging, and we give some preliminary empirical results.


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

Kevin KNIGHT is a Senior Research Scientist and Fellow at the Information
Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California. He is a
Research Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at USC,
and he is also Chief Scientist at Language Weaver, Inc.  Dr. KNIGHT
received his PhD from Carnegie Mellon University in 1991 and his BA from
Harvard University in 1986. He is co-author, with Elaine Rich, of the
textbook Artificial Intelligence.  His main research interests are
statistical natural language processing, machine translation, natural
language generation, and decipherment.  Dr. KNIGHT has authored over fifty
scientific papers on language translation, and he is active in building
and deploying large-scale language translation systems.  Previously, he
served on the editorial boards of the Computational Linguistics journal,
the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, and the ACM Transactions
on Speech and Language Processing.  Dr. KNIGHT was general chair of the
conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) in 2005,
and he was elected to serve as ACL president in 2011.