NLP Reading Group
The reading group attempts to keep abreast of current trends in natural language processing research. We typically read one or two recent NLP conference papers each week, and occasionally look at material from the machine learning, statistics, and linguistics communities as well.
Starting in 2008, we will be posting the weekly readings here. Past readings since 2001 will be posted shortly.
Summer 2007
| Date/Time | Presenter | Paper(s) | Supporting Papers/Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| May. 10 | David Smith | M. Johnson, T. Griffiths, and S. Goldwater
Bayesian Inference for PCFGs via Markov Chain Monte Carlo HLT/NAACL 2007 |
Spring 2007
| Date/Time | Presenter | Paper(s) | Supporting Papers/Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Apr. 19 | John Blatz | A. Prieditis
Machine discovery of Effective Admissible Heuristics Machine Learning Journal, 1993 | |
| Apr. 12 | Markus Dreyer | A. Haghighi, J. DeNero and D. Klein
Approximate Factoring for A* Search NAACL-HLT 2007 | |
| Mar. 29 & Apr. 5 | Zhifei Li | H. Daume III, J. Langford, and D. Marcu
Search-based structured prediction. Machine Learning Journal, forthcoming | |
| Mar. 8 | David Smith | H. Daume III & D. Marcu
Learning as search optimization: approximate large margin methods for structured prediction. ICML 2005 | |
| Mar. 1 | Wei Chen | M. Kaisser, S. Scheible, and B. Webber
Experiments at the University of Edinburgh for the TREC 2006 QA track. TREC-15 |
They do some fairly deep interpretation of sentences, extracting their predicate-argument structure. |
| Feb. 22 | Eric Harley | K. Kan Lo & W. Lam
Using Semantic Relations with World Knowledge for Question Answering TREC-15 | |
| Feb. 15 | Nikhil Bojja | C. Monson et. al.
Unsupervised Induction of Natural Language Morphology Inflection Classes ACL Student Workshop '04 | |
| Feb. 8 | Delip Rao | P. Schone and D. Jurafsky
Knowledge-free induction of morphology using latent semantic analysis CoNLL 2000 |
However, there was an extension of this work reported in NAACL-2001 that looks at circumfixes and prefix/affix combinations. [1]
|
| Feb. 1 | Nikesh Garera | D. Yarowsky and R. Wicentowski
Minimally supervised morphological analysis by multimodal alignment ACL 2000 |
For more details refer to Chapter 4 of Wicentowski's thesis. |
Fall 2007
| Date/Time | Presenter | Paper(s) | Supporting Papers/Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dec. 13 | Delip Rao | J. Carbonell et. al.
Context-based machine translation AMTA 2006 |
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| Dec. 6 | Jason Smith | M. Galley et. al.
Scalable Inference and Training of Context-Rich Syntactic Translation Models ACL 2006 |
It may also be helpful to look at:
M. Galley et. al. HLT/NAACL 2004
|
| Nov. 29 | Balakrishnan V | D. Marcu et. al.
SPMT: Statistical Machine Translation with Syntactified Target Language Phrases EMNLP 2006 | |
| Nov. 15 | Eric Harley | D. Chiang
An introduction to synchronous grammars ACL 2006 Tutorial |
Slides from the talk are also available. [2] |
| Nov. 8 | Elliott Drabek | K.Shklovsky
A Grammatical Sketch of Petalcingo Tzeltal Undergraduate Thesis, Reed College, 2005 |
It is 77 pages long, but not dense, and I will be skipping the following sections:
Pages 01-14 Phonetics and phonology 18-18 Polyvalence 21-21 Inherent possession and ... 46-55 Tense and aspect and other sections |
| Nov. 1 | Yi Su | M. Steedman
Gapping as Constituent Coordination Linguistics and Philosophy, Vol. 13, 1990, pp.207-264. |
See Yi for photocopies. |
| Oct. 25 | Markus Dreyer | S. Reizler et. al.
ACL 2002
| |
| Oct. 18 | Erin Fitzgerald | J. Bresnan & R.M. Kaplan
Lexical-Functional Grammar: A Formal System for Grammatical Representation The Mental Representation of Grammatical Relations, MIT Press, 1982 |
BTW, the edited collection that this appears in is generally interesting. Bresnan defends and develops lexicalized grammars in general; the idea of separate surface and semantic roles; and Bresnan & Kaplan's LFG in particular. You should know that she originated (in 1978) the extremely influential idea of lexicalized syntax -- the idea that a grammar is simply a collection of lexical entries to be assembled in standard language-independent ways, but that there are also "lexical redundancy rules" that relate, e.g., active and passive entries for the same verb. Some chapters address morphological and cognitive issues pertaining to lexicalization, including an essay by Pinker on lexicalist learning.
Slides from Erin's presentation can be found here. |
| Oct. 11 | John Blatz | L.Xu, D. Wilkinson, F. Southey, & D. Schuurmans
Discriminative Unsupervised Learning of Structured Predictors ICML 2006 | |
| Oct. 4 | Nikesh Garera | A. Culotta & J. Sorensen
Dependency Tree Kernels for Relation Extraction ACL 2004 D. Zelenko, C. Aone, & A. Richardella Kernel Methods for Relation Extraction JMLR, Volume 3, 2003 | |
| Sept. 27 | David Smith | C. Cortes, P. Haffner, & M. Mohri
NIPS 2003 |
Papers extending rational kernels, including results on positive semidefinite cases, are at:[3]
For the record, and not to be read, is an interesting parallel line of research in Fisher Kernels over strings, e.g. this paper by Saunders, Shawe-Taylor and Vinokourov: [4] |
| Sept. 20 | Elliot Drabek | K.Q. Weinberger, F. Sha, & L.K. Saul
Learning a kernel matrix for nonlinear dimensionality reduction ICML 2004 |
S.T. Roweis & L.K. Saul
Nonlinear Dimensionality Reduction by Locally Linear Embedding Science, 22 December 2000 --- J.B. Tenenbaum, V. De Silva, & J.C. Langford A global geometric framework for nonlinear dimensionality reduction Science, 22 December 2000 |
| Sept. 13 | Roy Tromble | L. Xu, J. Neufeld, B. Larson, & D. Schuurmans
NIPS 2004 |