Understanding Natural Language Understanding

ACM SIGAI (Artificial Intelligence) Bay Area Chapter inaugural meeting

Title: Understanding Natural Language Understanding

Abstract: Human language is the ultimate user interface. As computers migrate from desktop to pocket, car, home, and face, we increasingly rely on them to understand the meaning of our words. In this talk, I will survey the rapidly-evolving field of natural language understanding (NLU), including sentiment analysis, relation extraction, semantic parsing, and vector-space models of meaning. I’ll highlight the impact of massive datasets and deep neural networks, and I’ll report on recent advances in both academia and industry.

Speaker bio: Bill MacCartney is a Senior Research Scientist at Google, where he works on various problems in natural language understanding. Bill is also a Consulting Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, where he has taught CS224U (Natural Language Understanding) since 2010. During his Ph.D., Bill authored a significant part of the Stanford NLP toolkit, including the Recognizing Textual Entailment (RTE) system. Bill also serves as an advisor to a number of startups. Bill's profile on the web:

http://nlp.stanford.edu/~wcmac/

http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=mIgILbQAAAAJ

ACM SIGAI Bay Area Chapter: We are dedicated to advancing of machine learning, natural language processing, computer vision, and other AI fields. We are a community of AI researchers, engineers and students helping each other in research, commercial and open-source projects in the field.

Parking: There is free and convenient parking garage right next to Edmodo’s building on Park Place, entrance on the right, when facing Edmodo’s building.

Google Map location (https://www.google.com/maps/place/1200+Park+Pl+%23400/@37.545976,-122.290113,17z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m2!3m1!1s0x808f9ee03881d1e9:0x14c824fd1a1324d8)