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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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Title: Interacting with machines in natural language
Abstract: Computing machinery such as smartphones are ubiquitous, and so will be smart home appliances, self-driving cars and robots in the near future. Enabling these machines with natural language understanding abilities opens up potential opportunities for the broader society to benefit from, e.g., in accessing the world’s knowledge, or in controlling complex machines with little effort.
In this talk, we will focus on accessing knowledge stored in knowledge-bases and text documents in a colloquial manner. We will do so by processing language into programs that perform reasoning. The main questions we will explore are 1) which inductive biases on neural architectures are well suited for processing language to programs? 2) what is the role of linguistic structure? and 3) can we build models which produce answers without generating an explicit program?
Bio: Siva Reddy is a postdoc in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University working with Chris Manning. His research goal is to enable machines with natural language understanding abilities to facilitate applications such as question answering and conversational systems. His research is supported by grants from Amazon and Facebook. Before postdoc, he was a Google PhD fellow at the University of Edinburgh working with Mirella Lapata and Mark Steedman. His work experience includes an internship at Google and a research position at Sketch Engine.
