#Index Previous Next [CS] Advanced Notice: Talk by Fernando Pereira, AT&T Labs on 10 May Margery Ishmael marge at cs.uchicago.edu Tue Mar 28 12:04:40 CST 2000 * Previous message: [CS] Spring Mini-Courses and Lab Recitation sessions * Next message: [CS] CGS SPECIAL EVENT * Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Wednesday, 10 May Ryerson 251 at 2:30 pm (followed by refreshments in Ryerson 255) FERNANDO PEREIRA AT&T Labs -- Research presents: "Declarative Programming for a Messy World" Programming languages emerged from the tidy world of tabular data and artificial languages associated with formalized scientific and business disciplines. In contrast, naturally-occurring data is highly variable and ambiguous, making it a poor match for current programming techniques. Nevertheless, advances in data storage, transmission and encoding are bringing into the digital realm ever growing masses of natural data such as text, speech, images, and biological sequences. Effective processing of such data poses two related problems: how to model individual information sources, and how to specify how the evidence from multiple sources should be combined to answer particular information-processing needs. To address the first problem, my department has led advances in machine learning, information retrieval, natural-language processing and their connections to statistics and speech processing. In this talk, however, I will focus on the second problem and discuss a new approach to the integration of multiple uncertain information sources. This approach is based on declarative application-oriented languages whose semantics reflects directly the calculation of alternative results with different weights of evidence, and the appropriate rules for combining those weights. As the main example, I will describe the library I developed with Merhyar Mohri and Michael Riley for combining finite-state information sources in speech and text processing, which is used in all current speech recognition and synthesis projects at AT&T Labs. The semantic foundation of the library supports powerful combination and optimization methods generalizing standard finite-state algorithms, and allows a variety of implementation techniques derived from lazy evaluation and memorization in declarative programming. As a second example, I will outline William Cohen's WHIRL system, which uses a Datalog-like query language with approximate field matching and evidence weighting drawn from vector-space information retrieval to answer queries over semi-structured data from multiple Web sites. WHIRL relies on an efficient query processing algorithm combining deductive database techniques with heuristic search. I will conclude by drawing connections with current research on languages for probabilistic reasoning in graphical models that suggest interesting directions for further work. Host: Michael O'Donnell ======================================================== Margery Ishmael Project Assistant Department of Computer Science 1100 E. 58th St. Chicago, IL 60637 tel: 773 834-3152 fax: 773 702-8487 marge at cs.uchicago.edu -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... 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