Prof. Bonnie Webber from the University of Edinburgh will give a Global lecture at KAIST on July 17th and 19th as follows:

Title: Discourse in Language Technology
Speaker: Professor Bonnie Webber
Affiliation: School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh (UK)
Time:
- Lecture 1: July 17 (Tuesday), 2012, 2:00 PM ~ 5:00 PM
- Lecture 2: July 19 (Thursday), 2012, 2:00 PM ~ 5:00 PM
Place: Oh Sang-Su Seminar Room, CS Building (#4443, E3-1)
Host: Professor Jong C. Park (박종철 교수)

Lecture Description
The discourse properties of text have long been recognized as critical to Language Technology, and over the past 40 years, our understanding of and ability to exploit these properties have grown in many ways. The goal of these two lectures is to recount these developments, the technologies they employ, the applications they support, and the new challenges that each subsequent development has raised. The audience will thus be introduced to viable notions of discourse structure that have emerged over the past two decades, and how they are being used to improve the performance of systems for information extraction, summarization, essay analysis and grading, sentiment detection and opinion mining, and machine translation.

LECTURE 1:
■ Description of several complementary bases that organize and structure texts, along with a description of their different formal properties.
■ Description of state-of-the-art algorithms for recognizing the different forms of text structure, along with resources used by these algorithms for training and/or testing (or that will soon be available for these purposes).

LECTURE 2:
■ Description of applications of these algorithms in automated essay evaluation, summarization, information extraction, opinion mining and sentiment detection.
■ Description of current and future applications of discourse structure in machine translation (MT), or facilitated through MT.

The lectures draw from recent articles and monographs, including [Webber et al, 2012], [Webber and Joshi, 2012], and [Stede, 2011]. They do not assume detailed linguistic knowledge on the part of audience members, but they do assume that the audience will have had some exposure to text, even if only as bags of words or N-gram language models.

Biography

Fellow, American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)
Vice President, Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 1979
President, Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 1980
Co-chair (with Benjamin Kuipers), National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-97), 1997

PhD: Harvard University (1978)

Bibliography
Manfred Stede (2011). Discourse Processing. Morgan and Claypool Publishers.

Bonnie Webber and Aravind Joshi (2012). Discourse Structure and Computation: Past, Present and Future.
Proc. ACL Workshop on Rediscovering 50 Years of Discoveries. Jeju Island, Korea.

Bonnie Webber, Markus Egg and Valia Kordoni (2012). Discourse Structure and Language Technology.
Natural Language Engineering, doi:10.1017/S1351324911000337.

Contact: Hye-Jin Min (hjmin@nlp.kaist.ac.kr , T. 7741)