Minnesota Natural Language Processing Seminar Series: Neuro-Symbolic Modeling of Text and Social Context

The Minnesota Natural Language Processing (NLP) Seminar is a venue for faculty, postdocs, students, and anyone else interested in theoretical, computational, and human-centric aspects of natural language processing to exchange ideas and foster collaboration. The talks are every other Friday from 12 p.m. - 1 p.m. during the Spring 2022 semester.

This week's speaker, Dan Goldwasser (Purdue University), will be giving a talk titled "Neuro-Symbolic Modeling of Text and Social Context"

Abstract 

Understanding natural language communication often requires context, such as the speakers' backgrounds and social conventions, however, when it comes to computationally modeling these interactions, we typically ignore their broader context and analyze the text in isolation. In this talk, I will review on-going work demonstrating the importance of holistically modeling behavioral, social, and textual information. I will focus on several NLP problems, including political discourse analysis on Twitter and partisan news detection, and discuss how jointly modeling text and social behavior can help reduce the supervision effort and provide a better representation for language understanding tasks.

Biography

Dan Goldwasser is an Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science at Purdue University. He is broadly interested in connecting natural language with real world scenarios and using them to guide natural language understanding. His current interests focus on grounding political discourse to support understanding real-world scenarios, using neuro-symbolic representations. Dan Completed his PhD in Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Maryland. He has received research support from the NSF, including a recent CAREER award, DARPA and Google.

Start date
Friday, March 25, 2022, Noon
End date
Friday, March 25, 2022, 1 p.m.
Location

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