28 July 2006

Loss versus Conditional Probability

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There was a talk in the session I chaired at ACL about directly optimizing CRFs to produce low F-scores for problems like NE tagging and ch...
5 comments:
25 July 2006

Preprocessing vs. Model

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Back from Sydney now, and despite being a bit jetlagged, I thought I'd begin with an COLING/ACL-related post. There was a paper presen...
6 comments:
15 July 2006

Where are Interesting Learning Problems in NLP?

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I just spent a few days visiting Yee Whye and NUS ( photos to prove it!). YW and I talked about many things, but one that stood out as a...
1 comment:
13 July 2006

Conference Formats

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There are two conference formats I'm familiar with. One is typified by ACL and ICML; the other by NIPS. The ACL format is a roughly 3 ...
2 comments:

Visa Problems entering USA?

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Some people are trying to do something about it (contacting congressmen, etc.). If you've had problems entering the US for conferences, ...
1 comment:
07 July 2006

What is Natural Language Understanding?

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I've read lots of papers and seen lots of talks that justify a task as being useful to doing "natural language understanding."...
1 comment:
03 July 2006

My Thesis Path

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(Minor note: the latest version of the EDT section didn't get folded in properly to the version of the thesis that went up yesterday; t...
3 comments:
02 July 2006

Thesis is Done!

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I'm happy to announce that my thesis, Practical Structured Learning Techniques for Natural Language Processing , is now done (which is g...
3 comments:
27 June 2006

Beating an N-Gram

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Our entry into the NIST MT eval this year has a recapitalization component, currently being done by a large language model (500mb, gzipped) ...
6 comments:
19 June 2006

Having an Impact

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Having just completed my thesis, I've been thinking a lot about what directions I should persue, post-graduation. While I'll proba...
11 comments:
15 June 2006

Approximating the Problem or the Solution

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A while back I came across a paper that (in a completely separate context) argues for approximating problems in lieu of approximating solu...
4 comments:
13 June 2006

Incremental Improvements

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I usually think of incremental improvements as the result of taking an existing result X and twiddling X a little to yield Y. This can happ...
3 comments:
09 June 2006

NAACL: The post-hoc short-list

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NAACL is over, and while the majority of the conference took place in hallways for me this time around (lots of old and new friends made th...
3 comments:
31 May 2006

ACL papers up

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Available here . Some that look especially interesting: A Discriminative Global Training Algorithm for Statistical MT (Tillmann and Zhang) ...
2 comments:
26 May 2006

Here's a Loss, There's a Loss

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There are several different notions of "loss" that one encounters in machine learning literature. The definition I stick with is: ...
3 comments:
23 May 2006

Penn Discourse TreeBank

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I visited Penn last November and while talking with Joshi , I found out about a recent annotation effort from Penn/LDC: the Penn Discourse T...
2 comments:
21 May 2006

Getting Started In: Summarization

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I'll kick off the "Getting Started In" series with summarization, since it is near and dear to my heart. Warning: I should poi...
2 comments:
16 May 2006

Structured Prediction versus Multitask Learning

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For a formal comparison, I will briefly define both SP and MTL: A structured prediction problem is a distribution D over pairs (x,y) , wit...
1 comment:
14 May 2006

NLP is an Engineering Discipline?

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At my graduation ceremony this past week, Dean Yannis Yortsos gave a short speech, in which he quoted someone famous (I've already for...
12 comments:
11 May 2006

ICML Accepted Papers Up

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See here . I'm excited to see: Bayesian Multi-Population Haplotype Inference (Xing, Sohn, Jordan + Teh) Constructing Informative ...