NSF Partnership for Research and Education (PIRE) (article)

PIRE: Investigation of Meaning Representations
in Language Understanding
for Speech Reconstruction and
Machine Translation Systems

Partners

People

Project Summary

Publications

Call for
Students

Partner Institutions:

The Johns Hopkins University
Center for Language and Speech Processing (CLSP)

Brown University
Brown Laboratory for Linguistic Information Processing (BLLIP)

Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic
Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics (ÚFAL)

Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany
Department of Computational Linguistics and Phonetics ()

People:

Faculty Researchers Eugene Charniak Mark Johnson Jason Eisner Sanjeev Khudanpur Keith Hall Dietrich Klakow Valia Kordoni Jan Hajič

Saarland University, Saarbrücken Rebecca Dridan Xiwen Cheng Brown University, USA Will Headden Matt Lease David McClosky Jenine Turner The Johns Hoskins University, USA Erin Fitzgerald Charles University, Prague Silvie Cinková Petr Pajas Jana Sindlerová (pregraduate) Josef Toman (pregraduate, since 2007)

Project Summary:

This Partnership for International Research and Education (PIRE) links senior and junior researchers from Johns Hopkins University and Brown University with counterparts from Charles University in the Czech Republic and Saarland University in Germany. The international team, led by Frederick Jelinek at Johns Hopkins, will investigate formal representations of linguistic meaning for use in speech recognition/reconstruction and machine translation (MT) systems. Their goal is to augment current speech recognition systems by applying a variety of formal models for deep syntactic/semantic representation so that output of their refined MT system becomes coherent, grammatical text.

The project's complementary education component involves introducing participating graduate students to European-developed linguistic formalisms and training them to apply those formalisms to problems in natural language processing. Results from the collaborative research, workshops and cross-training should advance the field of computational linguistics by integrating formal meaning representations and statistical methods for natural language processing so that modern computer resources can be exploited to more rapidly translate verbal communications from other languages into English. If successful, this work could revolutionize language modeling for automatic speech recognition so that even spontaneous speech may be translated into fluent, reconstructed text that efficiently captures the intended meaning of the speaker. This interdisciplinary PIRE in computational linguistics fulfills the program objective of advancing scientific knowledge by enabling experts in the United States and Europe to combine complementary talents and share research resources in areas of strong mutual interest and competence. Broader impacts include early career introduction of U.S. graduate students to an international professional network of leading linguists, computational theorists, and experts in human language technology.

Publications:

Forthcoming

Call for Graduate Student Participation

The combined faculties in speech recognition and natural language processing at Johns Hopkins University and Brown University are now seeking qualified and motivated graduate students to pursue research in the areas of machine translation and the new field of speech reconstruction through the PIRE program. Students participating in PIRE will not only be provided with funding for their Ph.D. studies in the United States, but will have the rare opportunity to spend a semester or two studying and conducting research abroad with the highly reputed computational linguists of Charles University (in Prague, Czech Republic) and/or Saarland University (in Saarbrücken, Germany). Because the program is designed with such international interaction in mind, this travel should not delay progress toward their Ph.D.

Interested students must be enrolled full-time at either Johns Hopkins University or Brown University. For information regarding application to the universities, see the admissions sites and application forms at JHU and Brown. Additional questions and interest in participating in the PIRE program may be directed to Monique Folk at JHU.