Ladies and gentlemen, Here comes the first MITACS seminar, by Ronan Collobert, this friday, 2 pm at UdeM.

Ronan Collobert Friday Oct 10th, 2008, 14:00 Room 3195 (pav. André-Aisenstadt)

Large Scale Learning for Natural Language Processing

We describe a neural network architecture that given a sentence, outputs a host of language processing predictions: part-of-speech tags, chunks, named entity tags, semantic roles, semantically similar words and the likelihood that the sentence makes sense (grammatically and semantically) using a language model. The entire network is trained jointly on all these tasks using weight-sharing, an instance of multitask learning. All the tasks use labeled data except the language model which is learnt from unlabeled text and represents a novel way of performing semi-supervised learning for the shared tasks. We show how both multitask learning and semi-supervised learning improve the generalization of the shared tasks, resulting in a learnt model with state-of-the-art performance.