BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:-//128.220.36.25//NONSGML kigkonsult.se iCalcreator 2.26.9// CALSCALE:GREGORIAN METHOD:PUBLISH X-FROM-URL:https://www.clsp.jhu.edu X-WR-TIMEZONE:America/New_York BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:America/New_York X-LIC-LOCATION:America/New_York BEGIN:STANDARD DTSTART:20231105T020000 TZOFFSETFROM:-0400 TZOFFSETTO:-0500 RDATE:20241103T020000 TZNAME:EST END:STANDARD BEGIN:DAYLIGHT DTSTART:20240310T020000 TZOFFSETFROM:-0500 TZOFFSETTO:-0400 RDATE:20250309T020000 TZNAME:EDT END:DAYLIGHT END:VTIMEZONE BEGIN:VEVENT UID:ai1ec-20730@www.clsp.jhu.edu DTSTAMP:20240329T133032Z CATEGORIES;LANGUAGE=en-US:Seminars CONTACT: DESCRIPTION:Abstract\nRaytheon BBN participated in the IARPA MATERIAL progr am\, whose objective is to enable rapid development of language-independen t methods for cross-lingual information retrieval (CLIR). The challenging CLIR task of retrieving documents written (or spoken) in one language so t hat they satisfy an information need expressed in a different language is exacerbated by unique challenges posed by the MATERIAL program: limited tr aining data for automatic speech recognition and machine translation\, sca nt lexical resources\, non-standardized orthography\, etc. Furthermore\, t he format of the queries and the “Query-Weighted Value” performance measur e are non-standard and not previously studied in the IR community. In this talk\, we will describe the Raytheon BBN CLIR system\, which was successf ul at addressing the above challenges and unique characteristics of the pr ogram.\nBiography\n\nDamianos Karakos has been at Raytheon BBN for the pas t nine years\, where he is currently a Senior Principal Engineer\, Researc h. Before that\, he was research faculty at Johns Hopkins University. He h as worked on several Government projects (e.g.\, DARPA GALE\, DARPA RATS\, IARPA BABEL\, IARPA MATERIAL\, IARPA BETTER) and on a variety of HLT-rela ted topics (e.g.\, speech recognition\, speech activity detection\, keywor d search\, information retrieval). He has published more than 60 peer-revi ewed papers. His research interests lie at the intersection of human langu age technology and machine learning\, with an emphasis on statistical meth ods. He obtained a PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Ma ryland\, College Park\, in 2002. DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20210924T120000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20210924T131500 LOCATION:Hackerman Hall B17 @ 3400 N. Charles Street\, Baltimore\, MD 21218 SEQUENCE:0 SUMMARY:Damianos Karakos (Raytheon BBN) “The Raytheon BBN Cross-lingual Inf ormation Retrieval System developed under the IARPA MATERIAL Program” URL:https://www.clsp.jhu.edu/events/damianos-karakos/ X-COST-TYPE:free X-ALT-DESC;FMTTYPE=text/html:\\n\\n
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\nRaytheon BBN participated in the IARPA MATERIAL progr am\, whose objective is to enable rapid development of language-independen t methods for cross-lingual information retrieval (CLIR). The challenging CLIR task of retrieving documents written (or spoken) in one language so t hat they satisfy an information need expressed in a different language is exacerbated by unique challenges posed by the MATERIAL program: limited tr aining data for automatic speech recognition and machine translation\, sca nt lexical resources\, non-standardized orthography\, etc. Furthermore\, t he format of the queries and the “Query-Weighted Value” performance measur e are non-standard and not previously studied in the IR community. In this talk\, we will describe the Raytheon BBN CLIR system\, which was successf ul at addressing the above challenges and unique characteristics of the pr ogram.
\nBiography
\nDamianos Karakos has been at Raytheon BBN for the past nine years\, wh ere he is currently a Senior Principal Engineer\, Research. Before that\, he was research faculty at Johns Hopkins University. He has worked on seve ral Government projects (e.g.\, DARPA GALE\, DARPA RATS\, IARPA BABEL\, IA RPA MATERIAL\, IARPA BETTER) and on a variety of HLT-related topics (e.g.\ , speech recognition\, speech activity detection\, keyword search\, inform ation retrieval). He has published more than 60 peer-reviewed papers. His research interests lie at the intersection of human language technology an d machine learning\, with an emphasis on statistical methods. He obtained a PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland\, College Park\, in 2002.
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\nWhile there is a vast amount of text written about ne arly any topic\, this is often difficult for someone unfamiliar with a spe cific field to understand. Automated text simplification aims to reduce th e complexity of a document\, making it more comprehensible to a broader au dience. Much of the research in this field has traditionally focused on si mplification sub-tasks\, such as lexical\, syntactic\, or sentence-level s implification. However\, current systems struggle to consistently produce high-quality simplifications. Phrase-based models tend to make too many po or transformations\; on the other hand\, recent neural models\, while prod ucing grammatical output\, often do not make all needed changes to the ori ginal text. In this thesis\, I discuss novel approaches for improving lexi cal and sentence-level simplification systems. Regarding sentence simplifi cation models\, after noting that encouraging diversity at inference time leads to significant improvements\, I take a closer look at the idea of di versity and perform an exhaustive comparison of diverse decoding technique s on other generation tasks. I also discuss the limitations in the framing of current simplification tasks\, which prevent these models from yet bei ng practically useful. Thus\, I also propose a retrieval-based reformulati on of the problem. Specifically\, starting with a document\, I identify co ncepts critical to understanding its content\, and then retrieve documents relevant for each concept\, re-ranking them based on the desired complexi ty level.
\nBiography
\nI ’m a research scientist at the HLTCOE at Johns Hopkins University. My prim ary research interests are in language generation\, diverse and constraine d decoding\, and information retrieval. During my PhD I focused mainly on the task of text simplification\, and now am working on formulating struct ured prediction problems as end-to-end generation tasks. I received my PhD in July 2021 from the University of Pennsylvania with Chris Callison-Burc h and Marianna Apidianaki.
\n\n X-TAGS;LANGUAGE=en-US:2021\,Kriz\,October END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT UID:ai1ec-21275@www.clsp.jhu.edu DTSTAMP:20240329T133032Z CATEGORIES;LANGUAGE=en-US:Student Seminars CONTACT: DESCRIPTION:Abstract\n\n\n\nAutomatic discovery of phone or word-like units is one of the core objectives in zero-resource speech processing. Recent attempts employ contrastive predictive coding (CPC)\, where the model lear ns representations by predicting the next frame given past context. Howeve r\, CPC only looks at the audio signal’s structure at the frame level. The speech structure exists beyond frame-level\, i.e.\, at phone level or eve n higher. We propose a segmental contrastive predictive coding (SCPC) fram ework to learn from the signal structure at both the frame and phone level s.\n\nSCPC is a hierarchical model with three stages trained in an end-to- end manner. In the first stage\, the model predicts future feature frames and extracts frame-level representation from the raw waveform. In the seco nd stage\, a differentiable boundary detector finds variable-length segmen ts. In the last stage\, the model predicts future segments to learn segmen t representations. Experiments show that our model outperforms existing ph one and word segmentation methods on TIMIT and Buckeye datasets. DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20220211T120000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20220211T131500 LOCATION:Ames Hall 234 @ 3400 N. Charles Street\, Baltimore\, MD 21218 SEQUENCE:0 SUMMARY:Student Seminar – Saurabhchand Bhati “Segmental Contrastive Predict ive Coding for Unsupervised Acoustic Segmentation” URL:https://www.clsp.jhu.edu/events/student-seminar-saurabhchand-bhati/ X-COST-TYPE:free X-ALT-DESC;FMTTYPE=text/html:\\n\\n
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\n\n\n\n\nAutomatic discovery of phone or word-like units is one of the core objectives in zero-resource speech processing. Recent attempts employ contrastive predictive coding (CPC)\, where the model learns repre sentations by predicting the next frame given past context. However\, CPC only looks at the audio signal’s structure at the frame level. The speech structure exists beyond frame-level\, i.e.\, at phone level or even higher . We propose a segmental contrastive predictive coding (SCPC) framework to learn from the signal structure at both the frame and phone levels.\n\n\nSCPC is a hierarchical mode l with three stages trained in an end-to-end manner. In the first stage\, the model predicts future feature frames and extracts frame-level represen tation from the raw waveform. In the second stage\, a differentiable bound ary detector finds variable-length segments. In the last stage\, the model predicts future segments to learn segment representations. Experiments sh ow that our model outperforms existing phone and word segmentation methods on TIMIT and Buckeye datasets.