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                                                     Seminar

             Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management
                                  The Chinese University of Hong Kong

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Title

:

Semantic distance measures with distributional profiles of coarse-grained concepts

　

　

　

Speaker

:

Professor Graeme Hirst

　

　

Department of Computer Science,

　

　

University of Toronto

　

　

　

Date

:

May 5th, 2009 (Tuesday)

　

　

　

Time

:

4:30 p.m. - 5:30 p.m.

　

　

　

Venue

:

Room 513

　

　

William M.W. Mong Engineering Building

　

　

(Engineering Building Complex Phase 2)

　

　

CUHK

　

　

　

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Abstract:
　

Although semantic distance measures are applied to words in textual tasks such as building lexical chains, semantic distance is really a property of concepts, not words. We present a hybrid measure of semantic distance based on distributional profiles of concepts that we infer from text corpora. We use only a very coarse-grained inventory of concepts -- each category of a published thesaurus is taken as a single concept -- and yet obtain results on basic semantic distance tasks that are generally as good as methods that use fine-grained word-based measures. Because the measure is based on naturally occurring text, it is able to find word pairs that stand in non-classical relationships not found in WordNet. It can be applied cross-lingually, using a thesaurus in one language to measure semantic distance between words in another. In addition, it can used to determine the degree of antonymy between words.

Parts of this work were carried out in collaboration with Bonnie Dorr and Philip Resnik, University of Maryland, and Iryna Gurevych and Torsten Zesch, Technische Universitat Darmstadt.


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Biography:
　

Graeme Hirst received a PhD in Computer Science from Brown University in 1983, and has worked at the University of Toronto ever since.

Professor Hirst\\\'s research has covered a broad but integrated range of topics in computational linguistics, natural language understanding, and related areas of cognitive science. These include the resolution of ambiguity in language understanding; psychological reality in natural language systems; the preservation of author\\\'s style in machine translation; recovering from misunderstanding and non-understanding in human-computer communication; and linguistic constraints on knowledge-representation systems. His present research includes the problem of near-synonymy in lexical choice in language generation; computer assistance for collaborative writing; and applications of lexical chaining as an indicator of semantic distance in texts. A recent spinoff of this research is an intelligent spelling checker. From 1994 to 1997, Professor Hirst was a member of the Waterloo-Toronto HealthDoc project, which aimed to build intelligent systems for the creation and customization of health-care documents.

Professor Hirst was the founding editor of Canadian Artificial Intelligence, and is on the editorial boards of Machine Translation and Computational Linguistics, having been book review editor of the latter for more than a decade. He has written or co-authored over 60 research papers, and is the author of two monographs: Anaphora in Natural Language Understanding (Springer-Verlag, 1981) and Semantic Interpretation and the Resolution of Ambiguity (Cambridge University Press, 1987). He is the recipient of two awards for excellence in teaching, and a best-paper award at the AAAI-84 conference. He has supervised more than 35 theses and dissertations, four of which have been published as books.


************************* ALL ARE WELCOME ************************

　

　

　

Host

:

Prof. Kai Fai Wong

Tel

:

(852) 2609-8332

Email

:

kfwong@se.cuhk.edu.hk

　

　

　

Enquiries

:

Prof. Nan Chen or Prof. Sean X. Zhou

　

:

Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management

　

　

CUHK

Website

:

http://www.se.cuhk.edu.hk/~seg5810

Email

:

seg5810@se.cuhk.edu.hk

　

　

　

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