[CL+NLP Lunch] CL-NLP-MT Lunch, Stefan Riezler, May 13 @ noon

[Chris Dyer]

*Speaker*: Stefan Riezler, Heidelberg University
(http://www.cl.uni-heidelberg.de/~riezler/)
*Date*: Tuesday, May 13, 2014
*Time*: 12:00 noon
*Venue*: GHC 6501

*Title: *Theoretical and Practical Grounding in Empirical Computational
Linguistics

*Abstract*:
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.

*Bio*: 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.
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