Course Information

The LTI colloquium is a series of talks related to language technologies. The topics include but are not restricted to Computational Linguistics, Machine Translation, Speech Recognition and Synthesis, Information Retrieval, Computational Biology, Machine Learning, Text Mining, Knowledge Representation, Computer-Assisted Language Learning and Intelligent Language Tutoring. To get credit of the course, students are required to write either a short critique of one of the presentations or a comparison of two.

Time:	Fridays 2:30-3:50pm
Location:	7500 Wean Hall
Instructor:	Teruko Mitamura, teruko (at) cs.cmu.edu
TA:	Yi-Chia Wang, yichiaw (at) cs.cmu.edu

UpComing talk

April 29, Friday, 2:30pm

A Guided Tour of Latent Semantic Mapping

Jerome R. Bellegarda, Apple Inc.

Abstract:
Originally formulated in the context of information retrieval, latent semantic analysis exhibits three main characteristics: (i) words and documents (i.e., discrete entities) are mapped onto a continuous vector space; (ii) this mapping is determined by global correlation patterns; and (iii) dimensionality reduction is an integral part of the process. Because such fairly generic properties may be advantageous in a variety of different contexts, this has sparked interest in a more inclusive interpretation of the underlying paradigm. The outcome is latent semantic mapping, a data-driven framework for modeling global relationships implicit in large volumes of data. The purpose of this talk is to give a broad overview of the framework, highlight the possibilities it offers for general feature extraction, and underscore the multi-faceted benefits it can bring to a number of problems in speech and language processing. We conclude with a discussion of the inherent trade-offs associated with the approach, and some perspectives on its likely role in information extraction going forward.

Bio:
Jerome R. Bellegarda is currently Apple Distinguished Scientist in Human Language Technologies at Apple Inc, Cupertino, California. His general interests span voice-driven man-machine communications, multiple input/output modalities, and multimedia knowledge management. In these areas he has written approximately 150 publications, and holds about 50 U.S. and foreign patents. He has served on many international scientific committees, review panels, and advisory boards. In particular, he has worked as Expert Advisor on speech technology for both the National Science Foundation and the European Commission, was Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing, served on the IEEE Signal Processing Society Speech Technical Committee, and is currently an Editorial Board member for both Speech Communication and the ACM Transactions on Speech and Language Processing. He is a Fellow of the IEEE.

SCHEDULE

Jan 14	---------------------No Colloquium---------------------
Jan 21	Alexander Hauptmann, SCS	Video Information Extraction for Long Term Activity Analysis in Health Care
Jan 28	----------Faculty Meeting (No Colloquium) ----------
Feb 4	Roni Rosenfeld	Predicting Influenza
Feb 11	David Smith, Univ. of Mass	Efficient Inference for Declarative Approaches to Language
Feb 18	Jaime Carbonell	Language Technologies and Machine Learning in Computational Proteomics
Feb 25	Open House
March 4	Steve Minton, Fetch Technologies	Entity Resolution in a Open, Changing World
March 11	----------Spring Break (No Colloquium) ----------
March 18	Alice Oh (alumna) Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)	Applications of Latent Dirichlet Allocation and Hierarchical Dirichlet Processes
March 25	Ellen Riloff, Univ of Utah	Adventures in Bootstrapping: Acquiring Lexical Knowledge for NLP
March 30	David Ferrucci IBM	Deep Dive into Deep QA and Natural Language Technology
April 1	Eric Fosler-Lussier Ohio State Univ.	Integrating speech science and technology: New models for speech and audio processing
April 8	---------------------No Colloquium--------------------- (Instead, we will have Bonnie Webber on Apr. 21, which is Thursday)
April 15	---------- Spring Carnival (No Colloquium) ----------
April 21	Bonnie Webber University of Edinburgh	Discourse Structures and Language Technologies
April 22	Mark Steedman University of Edinburgh	The Statistical Problem of Language Acquisition
April 29	Jerome Bellegarda Apple Inc.	A Guided Tour of Latent Semantic Mapping