The Carolyn Baldwin Morrison Lecture

Regina Barzilay (MIT)

“Embracing Language Diversity: Unsupervised Multilingual Learning”

For centuries, the deep connection between human languages has fascinated scholars, and driven many important discoveries in linguistics and anthropology. In this talk, I will show that this connection can empower unsupervised methods for language  analysis. The key insight is that joint learning from several languages reduces uncertainty about the linguistic structure of each individual language.
 
I will present multilingual generative unsupervised models for morphological segmentation, part-of-speech tagging, and parsing. I will also discuss ongoing work on unsupervised decoding of ancient Ugaritic tablets using data from related Semitic languages. This is joint work with Benjamin Snyder, Tahira Naseem and Jacob Eisenstein.

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Regina Barzilay is an associate professor in the Department of  Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a member of the  Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.  Her  research interests are in natural language processing. She is a  recipient of the NSF Career Award, Microsoft Faculty Fellowship, and  has been named as one of "Top 35 Innovators Under 35" by Technology  Review Magazine.  She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from  Columbia University in 2003 and spent a year as a postdoc at Cornell  University. Regina received her M.S. in 1998 and B.A. in 1992, both  from Ben-Gurion University, Israel.

 

Computer Science

Colloquium

Fall 2009

 

4:15pm

B17 Upson Hall

Thursday, October 8, 2009

Refreshments at 3:45pm in the Upson 4th Floor Atrium

Sponsored by the CU-ADVANCE Center
(For information, contact Amy Pape Neish: amp73@cornell.edu )