Wednesday, September 7, 2016

Finding the wood from the Trees

I want to discuss the  work of three young guys (two are still phd students) that I'm very excited about.


First there's Mike Lewis (who talked at Nuance recently) about  his A* parsing algorithm. His webpage is http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~mlewis/. A very clear talk, a very nice guy.

I am  more interested in his old work on SRL(Semantic Role Labelling), but people at work were excited about his A* parsing, which seems extremely good, so he talked most about it.
There's an online demo of his EasySRL in EasySRL Parser Demo.

Then  I am also  excited about Gabriel Stanovsky's work described in
Gabi, who's interning this Summer at IBM Almaden, also has a DEMO online at http://u.cs.biu.ac.il/~stanovg/props.html (I  asked if he would like to talk to us about his phd work with Ido Dagan, and  he did. Talking to him was really fun!). His webpage is Gabriel Stanovsky and the project page is PropS -- Syntax Based Proposition Extraction .

Lastly, just because he was the last to come to Sunnyvale,  I am also very excited about Siva Reddy's work in https://github.com/sivareddyg/deplambda. (There is a demo here DepLambda Demo.)
His paper appeared in NAACL2016 and his Github has rules, but no real code, yet.

 
The paper is  Siva Reddy, Oscar Täckström, Michael Collins, Tom Kwiatkowski, Dipanjan Das, Mark Steedman, Mirella Lapata (2016). Transforming Dependency Structures to Logical Forms for Semantic Parsing.http://sivareddy.in/papers/reddy2016transforming.pdf Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, vol 4. 

Siva also talked at Nuance and talking to him was great, lots of interesting ideas and plenty of energy.
Three very interesting and  useful frameworks, very much in the directions I'm interested in pursuing. Three very bright and very nice guys. 

How to grab the best of these frameworks and make it work for me,  producing logical forms in a logic of contexts and concepts as the one in (Valeria de Paiva. Contexts for Quantification. 29 May 2013. Proceedings of the 11th International Symposium on Logical Formalizations of Commonsense Reasoning, Ayia Napa, Cyprus, 27-29 May 2013. [PDF])  is the question for me right now.