<div dir="ltr">Reminder everyone: this is Tuesday at 12 in 6501. Come welcome our new visitor, Stefan!</div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, May 8, 2014 at 2:28 PM, Chris Dyer <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:cdyer@cs.cmu.edu" target="_blank">cdyer@cs.cmu.edu</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><b style="font-size:13px">Speaker</b><font face="arial, sans-serif" style="font-size:13px">: </font><span style="font-size:13px">Stefan Riezler, Heidelberg University</span></div>
<div><span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">(</span><font face="arial, sans-serif"><a href="http://www.cl.uni-heidelberg.de/~riezler/" target="_blank">http://www.cl.uni-heidelberg.de/~riezler/</a>)</font></div>
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<b style="font-size:13px">Date</b><font face="arial, sans-serif" style="font-size:13px">: Tuesday, May 13, 2014</font></div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><b style="font-size:13px">Time</b><font face="arial, sans-serif" style="font-size:13px">: <span><span>12:00 noon</span></span></font><br>
</div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><b>Venue</b><font face="arial, sans-serif">: GHC 6501</font></div><br><b style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:12.800000190734863px">Title: </b>Theoretical and Practical Grounding in Empirical Computational Linguistics<br>
<br><font face="arial, sans-serif"><b>Abstract</b></font>:<br>Philosophy of science has pointed out a circularity problem in empirical sciences that arises if all known measuring procedures for a quantity of a theory presuppose the validity of this theory. We discuss how this problem relates to empirical computational linguistics, and define a criterion of T-non-theoretical grounding as guidance to avoid such circularities. We exemplify how this criterion can be met by crowdsourcing, task-related data annotation, or data in the wild. In particular, we illustrate the benefits of grounded learning in the area of statistical machine translation, e.g., by grounding machine translation in semantic parsing and in cross-lingual information retrieval.<br>
<br><b style="font-size:12.800000190734863px;font-family:arial,sans-serif">Bio</b>: Prof. Stefan Riezler has been appointed full professor and head of the chair of Linguistic Informatics at Heidelberg University in 2010, after spending a decade in the world’s most renowned industry research labs (Xerox PARC, Google). He received his PhD in Computational Linguistics from the University of Tübingen in 1998, and then conducted post-doctoral work at Brown University in 1999. Prof. Riezler's research focus is on machine learning and statistics applied to natural language processing problems, especially for the application areas of natural-language based web search and statistical machine translation.</div>
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