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

Dec 9, Friday, 2:30pm

Kevin Knight

ISI/USC

Language Translation and Code-Breaking

In 1949, Warren Weaver suggested applying cryptanalysis methods to the problem of automatic language translation. He said: "When I look at an article in Russian, I say: this is really written in English, but it has been coded in some strange symbols. I will now proceed to decode".

Weaver's inspiration has borne fruit in this century, as statistical techniques have enabled us to build translation systems for many languages, with increasing accuracy. But other fruitful connections between code-breaking and translation are only starting to emerge. This talk will examine some: estimating the amount of data required to break a cipher, building translation systems without parallel data, and solving a previously-undeciphered manuscript from the 1730s.

Bio:

Kevin Knight is a Senior Research Scientist and Fellow at the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute, and a Research Professor in the Computer Science Department at USC. He received a Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University and a bachelor's degree from Harvard University. His research interests include natural language processing, statistical modeling, machine translation, language generation, and decipherment. He currently serves as president of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

SCHEDULE

Sep 2	Alon Lavie	Statistical MT with Syntax and Morphology: Challenges and Some Solutions
Sep 9	----------SRS (No Colloquium) ----------
Sep 16	Bob Frederking	Going beyond Identifinder
Sep 23	Lori Levin	Modal Constructions in Machine Translation: beyond propositional semantics
Sep 30	Joseph Keshet Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago	Loss Minimization for Voice Onset Time (VOT) Measurement, Phoneme Alignment, and Phoneme Recognition
Oct 7	Huan Liu, ASU	When Connected, Are We Still in Control of Our Destinies?
Oct 14	Ed Hovy ISI/USC	Toward a New Semantics: Merging Propositional and Distributional Information
Oct 21	---------------------LTI anniversary (No Colloquium)---------------------
Oct 28	Martha Palmer Univ of Colorado	Beyond Shallow Semantics
Nov 4	Sarah Cohen Duke Univ.	Computation and Watchdog Journalism: Investigative Reporting Methods in the Digital Age
Nov 11	Yiming Yang LTI	Modeling Novelty in Multi-session Retrieval
Nov 18	Michael Mauldin Former LTI faculty	Turning your ideas into money by taking your company public
Nov 25	---------- Thanksgiving holiday (No Colloquium) ----------
Dec 2	Larry Birnbaum Northwestern Univ.	From Contextual Search to Automatic Content Generation: Scaling Human Editorial Judgment
Dec 9	Kevin Knight ISI/USC	Language Translation and Code-Breaking