Pushpak Bhattacharyya: Natural Language Processing & Machine Learning - Synergy or Divergence?
Channel: AI Institute at UofSC - #AIISC
Date: 2016-05-17

Distinguished Speaker Talk @ Kno.e.sis: 16 May 2016

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzeJBtSxi0JibnRZX0Fack9pVW8/view

ABSTRACT:
Today's NLP is highly machine learning oriented. Huge volumes of text in electronic form are available for processing, and it is hoped that the data will reveal the underlying regularities. One typically postulates a distribution, applies maximum likelihood or maximum entropy methods to find parameters, and uses the learnt distribution to predict linguistic phenomena. 

In this picture of NLP, linguistics seems to have no role. But as is the observation made repeatedly, accuracy values of prediction are reaching saturation. Since learning algorithms need features, insight into language is crucial for better feature engineering. In the current talk we will look at NLP tasks at various levels of processing and show how computation transitions gradually from being highly data driven to knowledge driven. A development, symptomatic of NLP-ML synergy/discord, called Deep Learning provides hope for large scale language processing, but grapples with the fundamental question of what word embeddings are after all. We will take a number of applications to bring out the need for better synergy between ML and linguistics for high performance NLP systems.

BIO:
Prof. Pushpak Bhattacharyya is the current President of ACL (2016-17). He is the Director of IIT Patna and Vijay and Sita Vashee Chair Professor in IIT Bombay, Computer Science and Engineering Department. He was educated in IIT Kharagpur (B.Tech), IIT Kanpur (M.Tech) and IIT Bombay (PhD). He has been visiting scholar and faculty in MIT, Stanford, Houston and University Joseph Fouriere (France).

Prof. Bhattacharyya's research areas are Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning and AI. He has guided more than 250 students (PhD, masters and Bachelors), has published more than 250 research papers and led government and industry projects of international and national importance amounting to several crores of rupees . A significant contribution of his is Multilingual Lexical Knowledge Bases and Projection.

Author of the text book "Machine Translation", Prof. Bhattacharyya is loved by his students for his inspiring teaching and mentorship.

Prof. Bhattacharyya is recipient of several awards and faculty grants, including the prestigious Dagstuhl seminar speaker, Manthan award, Patwardhan award, VNMM award, IBM Faculty award, Yahoo Faculty award and so on. He is Fellow of National Academy of Engineering India.