[CL+NLP Lunch] Jan Botha, CL+NLP Lunch Oct 24 @ noon

[Chris Dyer]

If you are interested in meeting with Jan (who has done a lot of work
on morphology, language modeling, and machine translation), sign up
here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/12-wTK4nXlkL2T27TewQUgNX1kWs1rg4FiGUhIU2Ac9w/edit

On Wed, Oct 16, 2013 at 2:26 PM, Dani Yogatama <dyogatama at cs.cmu.edu> wrote:
> CL+NLP Lunch (http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~nlp-lunch/)
> Speaker: Jan Botha, Oxford University
> Date: Thursday, October 24, 2013
> Time: 12:00 noon
> Venue: GHC 6115
>
> Title: Unsupervised learning of non+concatenative morphology
>
> Abstract:
> The popular view of words as sequences of morphemes may work
> for unsupervised morphological analysis of various languages, but it
> is overly simplistic in the face of non-concatenative phenomena such
> as root-templatic stem derivation in Semitic languages. I'll present a
> nonparametric Bayesian approach that addresses concatenative and
> non-concatenative morphology simultaneously. Experiments on Arabic and
> Hebrew show that the richer account of stem morphology improves
> morphological segmentation. Identification of discontiguous root
> morphemes is fairly accurate and could be a source of features for
> downstream language processing tasks. To illustrate the flexibility of
> the approach, I'll also sketch some untested instantiations targeting
> other non-concatenative processes such as circumfixing and infixing.
>
> Biography:
> Jan Botha is a fourth-year PhD student at Oxford University. As a
> member of the Computational Linguistics Group, his research focuses on
> statistical modelling of morphologically rich languages. This interest
> has led him on excursions into Bayesian nonparametrics and, more
> recently, distributed representation learning. Before moving to Oxford
> to take up his Rhodes scholarship, he completed an interdisciplinary
> Honours Bachelors degree in Physics, Maths and Computer Science at
> Stellenbosch University in South Africa.