30 January: Re: DCLRS -- Friday January 31, 16:00 -- Mark Finlayson (MIT)
Dublin Computational Linguistics Research Seminar: Index of January 2014 | Dublin Computational Linguistics Research Seminar - Index of year: 2014 | Full index
Friday this week (January 31, 2014), at 4pm, in room 3074 of the Arts
Building at Trinity College Dublin, Dr Mark Finlayson (MIT)n speaks in
the Dublin Computational Linguistics Research Seminar on:
Learning Narrative Structure: Algorithms & Data
Abstract:
Narrative structure is an ubiquitous and intriguing phenomenon. It is
found in stories across cultures, domains, and tasks, helping us
understand the higher-level meaning of texts and effectively use stories
for our purposes. Understanding and modeling narrative structure is an
anvil for forging new artificial intelligence and machine learning
techniques, and is a window into abstraction and conceptual learning as
well as into culture and its influence on cognition. I describe my
research program for computationally modeling and extracting narrative
structure from natural language texts. I first describe new techniques
for representing the "who does what to whom" of a narrative, a necessary
step if we are to computationally model the cognitive processes
involved. Second, I describe recent experiments demonstrating that we
are able to have annotators reliably capture explicit narrative
structures from text, the first time any one has demonstrated such a
result. Finally, I describe my technique for learning narrative
structure from text: I describe Analogical Story Merging (ASM), a
machine learning algorithm that can extract culturally-relevant plot
patterns from sets of folktales. I demonstrate that ASM can learn a
substantive portion of Vladimir Propp's influential theory of the
structure of story plots.
Bio:
Dr. Mark Finlayson is a Research Scientist at the Computer Science and
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT. His research focuses on
representing, extracting, and using higher-order semantic patterns in
natural language, especially with regard to narrative. He received the
B.S.E from the University of Michigan in 1998, and the M.S. and Ph.D.
from MIT in 2001 and 2012, respectively, all in Electrical Engineering
and Computer Science. He is general chair of the Computational Models
of Narrative (CMN) Workshop series, now approaching its fifth meeting,
and is lead guest editor of a special issue on Computational Models of
Narrative, to be published by the Journal of Literary & Linguistic
Computing in 2014.
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The Dublin Computational Linguistics Research Seminar series is a
cooperation among Dublin City University, Trinity College Dublin,
University College Dublin and the Dublin Institute of Technology, a
collaboration alongside the Centre for Next Generation Localisation.
All are welcome to participate!
www.scss.tcd.ie/disciplines/intelligent_systems/clg/clg_web/DCLRS
Dublin Computational Linguistics Research Seminar - Index of January 2014 | Index of year: 2014 | Full index