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Semantic Matching: The Next Big Thing 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: 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. *********************** 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.