Final reminder - today at 4pm: SMART Cognitive Science Lecture by Kevin Knight
Zuidema, Jelle
Final reminder - today at 4pm:
18 Jan 2012: SMART Cognitive Science Lecture
by Kevin Knight (ISI, USC)
Code-breaking and Language Translation: Some Connections
On January 18th, we will have our third SMART Cognitive Science Lecture, by computational linguist Kevin Knight. In his lecture, he will also discuss his recent research on the Copiale Cipher as covered in the New York Times. The lecture will be preceded by a short Perspective by Khalil Sima’an on the main challenges in current computational linguistics.
16h00-16h20 Khalil Sima’an (ILLC):
Perspective on Computational Linguistics.
16h20-17h10 Kevin Knight (ISI, USC):
Code-breaking and Language Translation: Some Connections
17h10 – 17h30 Questions & Discussion
17h30 – Drinks
Location: BH 0.04 (Bungehuis, Spuistraat 210, Amsterdam)
Abstract: In 1949, information theorist Warren Weaver suggested applying code-breaking methods to the problem of automatic language translation. He said: “When I look at an article in Russian, I say: this is really written in English, but it has been coded in some strange symbols. I will now proceed to decode”. Weaver’s inspiration has borne fruit in this century, as statistical techniques have enabled us to build translation systems for many languages, with increasing accuracy. But other fruitful connections between code-breaking and translation are only starting to emerge. We will examine some, including the solution to the Copiale Cipher, a previously-undeciphered manuscript from the 1700s.
Bio:Kevin Knight is a Senior Research Scientist and Fellow at the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California (USC), and a Research Professor in USC’s Computer Science Department. He received a PhD in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University and a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University. His research interests include natural language processing, statistical modeling, machine translation, and decipherment. In 2011, he served as President of the Association for Computational Linguistics.
Dr. Khalil Sima’an is Reader (UHD) in Computational Linguistics at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation of the University of Amsterdam.