Title: Word Sense Disambiguation: If You Can’t Resolve It, Avoid It
Lecturer: Dr. Xue, Nianwen (Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science, Brandeis University, US)
Chairperson: Dr. Bai, Xiaopeng (Department of Chinese Language and Literature, East China Normal University)
Date: 1:30 pm, May 17th, 2017 (Wednesday)
Venue: Room 5303, Building of School of Humanities, Minhang Campus, ECNU
Sponsor: Si-mian Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities, ECNU
Abstract of the Lecture:
Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) is the problem of determining the sense of a word in its context. It is one of the oldest problems in Computational Linguistics, and was first motivated by the apparent need of disambiguating polysemous words for Machine Translation. For example, depending on the context, the Chinese word书 can be translated into “book”, “letter”, or “write” in English. However, despite all the work that goes into building linguistic resources and developing automatic WSD systems, its impact on MT seems to be very limited. In the mean time, progress continued to be made in MT without the contribution from WSD research. In this talk I will discuss our work on examining translation divergences between Chinese and English as well as our work on defining meaning representations, and show that in many application scenarios, the best strategy may be trying to avoid resolving word senses.
Brief Introduction of the Lecturer:
Nianwen Xue is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department and the Language and Linguistics Program at Brandeis University. Before joining Brandeis, Dr. Xue was a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics and the Center for Computational Language and Education Research (CLEAR) at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Prior to that, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science and the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his PhD in Linguistics from University of Delaware. His research interests include syntactic, semantic, temporal and discourse annotation, semantic parsing, discourse analysis and Machine Translation. Dr. Xue is currently the Editor-in-Chief of TALLIP and serves on the editorial boards of LRE, and Lingua Sinica.