[CL+NLP Lunch] CL+NLP Lunch, Archna Bhatia, August 5 @ 2:00pm

[Dallas Card]

Please join us for the next CL+NLP lunch at 2pm on August 5th, where
Archna Bhatia will be speaking about the cross-linguistic study of
form-function mappings. Lunch will be provided!

CL+NLP lunch <http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~nlp-lunch/>
Tuesday, August 5th at 2:00pm
GHC 6501

Archna Bhatia, LTI

*Studying form-function mappings cross-linguistically*

Abstract:
Languages carry form-function mappings, and while this property is shared
across languages, the exact same mappings are not. Cross-linguistic
studies of these mappings enable us to study the extent of systematicity
and the range of variation observed in the mappings across languages. This
can, in turn, shed some light on the nature of human language. In this
talk, I present our recent efforts to explore a phenomenon, definiteness,
which expresses the mapping between morphosyntax and the semantic,
pragmatic and discourse properties of noun phrases. Starting with a novel
language-independent annotation scheme for definiteness, and statistical
modeling of communicative functions, this work provides insight into the
form-function mappings of English noun phrases. Besides aiding in an
understanding of the nature of language in general, discoveries about the
form-function mapping across languages hold promise for various NLP
applications such as machine translation, knowledge base construction, and
information retrieval.

Bio:
Archna Bhatia is a postdoctoral researcher in the Language Technologies
Institute. She received her PhD in Linguistics from University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign in 2011. In her thesis research, she focussed on the
phenomenon of agreement in the context of coordination in Hindi and
compared it with two genetically unrelated languages, one with the same
and one with different word order properties. She is interested in
developing an understanding of the nature of language by applying
theoretical, descriptive, experimental and computational methods to study
its structure and acquisition. She has collaborated with researchers in
Linguistics, Computational Linguistics and Computer Science departments in
this endeavor.


-- 
Dallas Card
Machine Learning Department
Carnegie Mellon University