Abstract:

Natural language is a pervasive human skill not yet fully achievable by automated computing systems. The main challenge is understanding how to computationally model the semantics of natural language and scale this understanding across a diverse set of natural languages.

In this talk, I will first present a system designed for tackling the problem of semantic understanding in English that is used in practice at Fountain.com. The second half of the talk will focus on scaling semantic understanding across a diverse set of natural languages. Specifically, I will present two probabilistic models that tackle two different linguistic tasks across multiple languages: syntactic parsing and joint learning of named entity recognition and coreference resolution.

The syntactic parsing model outperforms current state of the art models by discovering linguistic information shared across languages at the granular level of a sentence. The coreference resolution system is one of the first attempts at joint multilingual modeling of named entity recognition and coreference resolution with limited linguistic resources. It performs second best on three out of four languages when compared to state of the art systems built with rich linguistic resources. I show that we can simultaneously model both the depth and the breadth of natural languages using the underlying linguistic structure shared across languages.

Bio:

Andreea Bodnari is the chief data scientist at Fountain.com, a micro-consulting app that connects users to a curated set of experts on demand. She received her PhD from the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence lab, focused on Natural Language Processing and Healthcare Informatics. Throughout her research, she investigated how technology can be used to improve healthcare outcomes, decipher the mechanism behind the human language, and bring education to new heights. She is involved with the local and international academic community, and dedicates her spare time to causes such as improving gender inequality in the STEM fields and promoting education in developing countries.

Event agenda:

6:30 - 7:00pm: Food & Networking
7:00 - 8:30pm: Andreea's talk
8:30 - 9:00pm: Socializing

Food and drinks are generously being provided byMetis, who run a data science bootcamp here in NYC.