Semantic Matching: The Next Big Thing for Natural Language Processing?”

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                Joint Seminar
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The Hong Kong University of Science & Technology
Human Language Technology Center
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering
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Speaker:        Dr. Hang LI
                Chief Scientist, Noah's Ark Lab at Huawei

Title:          "Semantic Matching: The Next Big Thing for Natural
                 Language Processing?”

Date:           Monday, 7 April  2014

Time:           4:00pm – 5:00pm

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

Abstract:

Most natural language processing (NLP) tasks, such as information
retrieval, question answering, and machine translation, are based on
matching between language expressions. This approach works quite well in
practice; its limitation is also obvious, however. Sometimes mismatch
between language expressions can occur. We argue that ‘semantic matching’
is an effective approach to overcome the challenge, that is to conduct
more semantic analysis and perform matching between language expressions
at semantic level. In this talk, I will first point out why semantic
matching can help significantly enhance the performance of NLP. I will
then justify my argument with some examples. More specifically, I will
introduce our recent work on using machine learning techniques to
construct models for semantic matching. These include latent space model
for query document matching in search, string re-writing kernel for
question answering, and deep matching model for short text conversation.


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Biography:

Hang LI is chief scientist of the Noah’s Ark Lab at Huawei. He is also
adjunct professor of Peking University and Nanjing University. His
research areas include information retrieval, natural language processing,
statistical machine learning, and data mining. He graduated from Kyoto
University in 1988 and earned his PhD from the University of Tokyo in
1998. He worked at the NEC lab in Japan during 1991 and 2001, and
Microsoft Research Asia during 2001 and 2012.  He joined Huawei
Technologies in 2012. Hang has more than 100 publications at top
international journals and conferences, including SIGIR, WWW, WSDM, ACL
EMNLP, ICML, NIPS, and SIGKDD. He and his colleagues’ papers received the
SIGKDD’08 best application paper award, the SIGIR’08 best student paper
award, and the ACL’12 best student paper award. Hang has also been working
on the development of several products. These include Microsoft SQL Server
2005, Microsoft Office 2007 and Office 2010, Microsoft Live Search 2008,
Microsoft Bing 2009 and Bing 2010. He has also been very active in the
research communities and served or is serving the top conferences and
journals. Recently, he is senior program committee members or area chairs
of WSDM'13, IJCAI’13, KDD’13, ACL’13, ACML’13, and EMNLP’13; program
committee members of WWW’13, AIRS’13, NIPS’13, and ICDM’13; demo co-chair
of IJCNLP’13, and editorial board members of Computational Linguistics,
Journal of the American Society for Information Science, ACM Transaction
on Intelligent Systems and Technology, and the Journal of Computer Science
& Technology.