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SUMMARY:Does natural language understanding have anything to do with under
 standing natural language? - Ann Copestake
DTSTART:20161117T163000Z
DTEND:20161117T170000Z
UID:TALK68849@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Guy Edward Toh Emerson
DESCRIPTION:Natural language understanding (NLU) and natural language gene
 ration (NLG) are the main general goals of computational work on human lan
 guage. Does such work have anything to tell us about the scientific/lingui
 stic goal of understanding how natural languages behave? Can better unders
 tanding of linguistics help the development of practical computational tec
 hniques? It is far from obvious that the answer to these questions is yes\
 , since successful computational modelling does not necessarily imply any 
 real understanding. For instance\, trajectories of physical objects can be
  modelled without understanding the underlying physics. Fred Jelinek\, in 
 a talk given at an award ceremony in 2004\, admitted making the notorious 
 comment 'every time I fire a linguist\, our system performance improves' b
 ut argued that the goals of practical speech recognition simply did not co
 incide with the interests of the linguists. However\, in this talk\, I wil
 l suggest some more positive answers to these questions. I will describe D
 ELPH-IN\, a long-standing international collaboration involving researcher
 s who are explicitly addressing both linguistic and computational goals\, 
 and discuss some of its successes. I'll outline how the development of pre
 cision grammars for various languages allows us to investigate language sc
 ientifically\, and also to build practical systems for end users. I'll con
 clude by speculating how this sort of work can further progress in the bra
 ve new computational world of deep learning.\n\nYou can register for the s
 ymposium here:\nhttps://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/cambridge-language-sciences
 -symposium-2016-tickets-28454750926
LOCATION:Queen's Building\, Emmanuel College
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