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Abstract
Computational approaches to problems in Natural Language Understanding and Information Access and Extraction often involve assigning values to sets of interdependent variables. Examples of tasks of interest include semantic role labeling (analyzing natural language text at the level of who did what to whom, when and where), syntactic parsing, information extraction (identifying events, entities and relations), transliteration of names, and textual entailment (determining whether one utterance is a likely consequence of another). Over the last few years, one of the most successful approaches to studying these problems involves Constrained Conditional Models (CCMs), an Integer Learning Programming formulation that augments probabilistic models with declarative constraints as a way to support such decisions.I will present research within this framework, discussing old and new results pertaining to inference issues, learning algorithms for training these global models, and the interaction between learning and inference.
Biography
Dan Roth is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a University of Illinois Scholar. He is the director of a DHS Center for Multimodal Information Access & Synthesis (MIAS) and holds faculty positions in Statistics, Linguistics and at the School of Library and Information Sciences.Roth is a Fellow of the ACM and of AAAI for his contributions to Machine Learning and to Natural Language Processing. He has published broadly in machine learning, natural language processing, knowledge representation and reasoning, and learning theory, and has developed advanced machine learning based tools for natural language applications that are being used widely by the research community.Prof. Roth has given keynote talks in major conferences, including AAAI, EMNLP and ECML and presented several tutorials in universities and major conferences. Roth was the program chair of AAAI11, ACL03 and CoNLL’02, has been on the editorial board of several journals in his research areas and has won several teaching and paper awards. Prof. Roth received his B.A Summa cum laude in Mathematics from the Technion, Israel, and his Ph.D in Computer Science from Harvard University in 1995.