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-20987@www.clsp.jhu.edu DTSTAMP:20240329T001112Z CATEGORIES;LANGUAGE=en-US:Seminars CONTACT: DESCRIPTION:Abstract\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 Hopk ins University. My primary research interests are in language generation\, diverse and constrained decoding\, and information retrieval. During my P hD I focused mainly on the task of text simplification\, and now am workin g on formulating structured prediction problems as end-to-end generation t asks. I received my PhD in July 2021 from the University of Pennsylvania w ith Chris Callison-Burch and Marianna Apidianaki. DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20211022T120000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20211022T131500 LOCATION:Hackerman Hall B17 @ 3400 N. Charles Street\, Baltimore\, MD 21218 SEQUENCE:0 SUMMARY:Reno Kriz (HLTCOE – JHU) “Towards a Practically Useful Text Simplif ication System” URL:https://www.clsp.jhu.edu/events/reno-kriz-hltcoe-jhu-towards-a-practica lly-useful-text-simplification-system/ X-COST-TYPE:free X-ALT-DESC;FMTTYPE=text/html:\\n\\n
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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-22395@www.clsp.jhu.edu DTSTAMP:20240329T001112Z CATEGORIES;LANGUAGE=en-US:Seminars CONTACT: DESCRIPTION:Abstract\nRecursive calls over recursive data are widely useful for generating probability distributions\, and probabilistic programming allows computations over these distributions to be expressed in a modular and intuitive way. Exact inference is also useful\, but unfortunately\, ex isting probabilistic programming languages do not perform exact inference on recursive calls over recursive data\, forcing programmers to code many applications manually. We introduce a probabilistic language in which a wi de variety of recursion can be expressed naturally\, and inference carried out exactly. For instance\, probabilistic pushdown automata and their gen eralizations are easy to express\, and polynomial-time parsing algorithms for them are derived automatically. We eliminate recursive data types usin g program transformations related to defunctionalization and refunctionali zation. These transformations are assured correct by a linear type system\ , and a successful choice of transformations\, if there is one\, is guaran teed to be found by a greedy algorithm. I will also describe the implement ation of this language in two phases: first\, compilation to a factor grap h grammar\, and second\, computing the sum-product of the factor graph gra mmar.\n\nBiography\nDavid Chiang (PhD\, University of Pennsylvania\, 2004) is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engin eering at the University of Notre Dame. His research is on computational m odels for learning human languages\, particularly how to translate from on e language to another. His work on applying formal grammars and machine le arning to translation has been recognized with two best paper awards (at A CL 2005 and NAACL HLT 2009). He has received research grants from DARPA\, NSF\, Google\, and Amazon\, has served on the executive board of NAACL and the editorial board of Computational Linguistics and JAIR\, and is curren tly on the editorial board of Transactions of the ACL. DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20221017T120000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20221017T131500 LOCATION:Hackerman Hall B17 @ 3400 N. Charles Street\, Baltimore\, MD 21218 SEQUENCE:0 SUMMARY:David Chiang (University of Notre Dame) “Exact Recursive Probabilis tic Programming with Colin McDonald\, Darcey Riley\, Kenneth Sible (Notre Dame) and Chung-chieh Shan (Indiana)” URL:https://www.clsp.jhu.edu/events/david-chiang-university-of-notre-dame/ X-COST-TYPE:free X-ALT-DESC;FMTTYPE=text/html:\\n\\n
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