Seminar: Prof. Marie-Francine Moens, "Human Language Understanding"

Title: Human Language Understanding: Realizations and Bottlenecks

Abstract:

Starting from the first attempts of automated language understanding we explain the most important state-of-the art approaches. We illustrate the latter with our research of translating narratives written in natural language to events happening in a 3D virtual world (FP7 FET project MUSE) and pinpoint pertinent bottlenecks. In a second part, we go deeper into important research questions of what representations are most suited, how to ground the representations in the real perceptual world, what properties machine learning models should have, and how to measure the success of language understanding. Finally, we discuss progress made in the MUSTER project (EU CHIST-ERA) towards these goals.

Bio:

Marie-Francine (Sien) Moens is full professor at the Department of Computer Science at KU Leuven, Belgium. She holds a M.Sc. and a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from this university. She is the director of the Language Intelligence and Information Retrieval (LIIR) research lab, a member of the Human Computer Interaction group, and head of the Informatics section.
Her main direction of research is the development of novel methods for automated content recognition in text and multimedia using statistical machine learning and exploiting insights from linguistic and cognitive theories.
She is holder of the ERC Advanced Grant CALCULUS (2018-2023) granted by the European Research Council. From 2012 till 2016 she was the cooordinator of the MUSE project financed by Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) - Open of the European Commission. She is currently associate editor of the journal IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI) and is a member of the editorial board of the journal Foundations and Trends® in Information Retrieval. In 2011 and 2012 she was appointed as chair of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) and was a member of the executive board of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). From 2010 until 2014 she was a member of the Research Council of KU Leuven and from 2014 until 2018 she was a member of the Council of the Industrial Research Fund of KU Leuven. From 2014 till 2018 she was the scientific manager of the EU COST action iV&L Net (The European Network on Integrating Vision and Language).

Organisational information:

This particular meetup is part of a seminar series on Natural Language Processing funded by the Centre for Communication and Computing (CCC) at the University of Copenhagen. There will be refreshments from 16:30, the talk will start at 17:00.