David Chiang (University of Notre Dame) “Exact Recursive Probabilistic Programming with Colin McDonald, Darcey Riley, Kenneth Sible (Notre Dame) and Chung-chieh Shan (Indiana)”

When:
October 17, 2022 @ 12:00 pm – 1:15 pm
2022-10-17T12:00:00-04:00
2022-10-17T13:15:00-04:00
Where:
Hackerman Hall B17
3400 N. Charles Street
Baltimore
MD 21218
Cost:
Free

Abstract

Recursive 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, existing 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 wide variety of recursion can be expressed naturally, and inference carried out exactly. For instance, probabilistic pushdown automata and their generalizations are easy to express, and polynomial-time parsing algorithms for them are derived automatically. We eliminate recursive data types using program transformations related to defunctionalization and refunctionalization. These transformations are assured correct by a linear type system, and a successful choice of transformations, if there is one, is guaranteed to be found by a greedy algorithm. I will also describe the implementation of this language in two phases: first, compilation to a factor graph grammar, and second, computing the sum-product of the factor graph grammar.
Biography
David Chiang (PhD, University of Pennsylvania, 2004) is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Notre Dame. His research is on computational models for learning human languages, particularly how to translate from one language to another. His work on applying formal grammars and machine learning to translation has been recognized with two best paper awards (at ACL 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 currently on the editorial board of Transactions of the ACL.

Center for Language and Speech Processing