Natural Language Processing with a Purpose (And -How Does Pragmatics Help?) – A Lecture by Dr. Barbara Di Eugenio
“Linguistics + _______” An Interdisciplinary Talk Series
April 28, 2021
4:00 PM - 5:30 PM
Abstract: Natural Language Processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary area of Computer Science whose advances are becoming more and more widespread, as evidenced by Google Translate or Siri. My focus in NLP is what I call "NLP with a purpose": technology that has high potential for societal impact. I will touch on several research projects that run the gamut from modelling natural interactions between elderly people and their human helpers to be mimicked in robotic assistants; to developing models of health coaching conversations so as to help patients achieve behavioral change; to designing a conversational interface for visualization of data. All this work is grounded in pragmatic concepts, such as speech acts, anaphora and referential expressions.
Speaker: Barbara Di Eugenio is Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois, Chicago campus. There she leads the NLP laboratory. She obtained her PhD in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania (1993). Dr. Di Eugenio is an NSF CAREER awardee (2002); the 2013 Innovator of the Year award from AWIS Chicago, the local chapter of the Association for Women in Science; and a UIC University Scholar (2018-2020). She was also the recipient of the UIC Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2019. Her research has been supported by NSF, ONR, NIH, Motorola, Yahoo!, Politecnico di Torino, and the Qatar Research Foundation.
Join via Zoom:
Meeting ID: 832 1013 8587
Passcode: ling2021
Date posted
Jan 14, 2021
Date updated
Apr 12, 2021