TITLE: Inducing structure and using it

PRESENTER: Menno van Zaanen, http://www.ics.mq.edu.au/~menno/, menno@ics.mq.edu.au

AFFILIATION:ICS, Macquarie University, http://www.ics.mq.edu.au/

DATE: Friday 3rd November 2006

TIME: 12:00:00

PLACE: NICTA L5 Level 1 Seminar Room (east)

ABSTRACT:

Sequential data is all round us. We find it in many situations and in
many contexts. For example, biomedical data, financial data, music,
and natural language all contain sequences in some form. For a
computer to do something useful with these sequences, it is often
necessary to assign structure to them. The structure illustrates
important aspects of the sequence. The process of structuring, called
parsing, is most often done according to a grammar and there exist
relatively efficient ways of structuring sequences when a grammar is
known.

When the grammar is not known beforehand, however, structuring
sequences is harder. In the first part of this talk, I will present
the Alignment-Based Learning (ABL) framework which aims at structuring
sequences when a grammar is not available or not complete. It
analyses sequences and finds regularities, which indicate possible
structures. ABL has been applied successfully in different fields,
such as machine learning, morphology, machine translation, and formal
language learning. The second part of the talk consists of several
example applications using ABL.

BIOGRAPHY OF SPEAKER:

Menno van Zaanen is a Postdoc Research Fellow at Division of Information
and Communication Sciences (ICS), Department of Computing, Macquarie
University. Zaanen received an MSc in Computer Science from Vrije
Universiteit, Amsterdam in 1997, an MA in Computational Linguistics from
University of Amsterdam in 1998, and a PhD in Computational Linguistics
from University of Leeds, UK in 2002. Zaanen's research interests include
unsupervised grammar/structure induction, parsing techniques, statistical
natural language processing, machine learning, machine translation,
computational musicology, multi-modal information retrieval, error
correction/proofing tools, question answering.

Seminar information is also available at
http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/db/ai/seminars/list/index.html

Host:

William Uther

Seminar Convenor:

Van Hai Ho