Colloquium: Structured Approaches to Natural Language Understanding

Despite recent advancements in Natural Language Processing, computers today cannot understand text in the ways that humans can. My research aims at creating computational methods that not only read but
also understand text. To accomplish this, I develop machine-learning methods that incorporate linguistic cues as well as the context in which they appear to understand language. In this talk, I will discuss two specific applications of language understanding that focus on comprehension of narratives: (i) Choosing correct endings to stories, and (ii) Automatically generating narratives. I will also discuss my ongoing and future work on applications of language understanding in domains like education, digital humanities and mental health care.

Coffee and cookies will be available.