THESIS DEFENSE: Unsupervised Multilingual Learning
Speaker: Benjamin Snyder , MIT CSAIL
Date: September 2 2010
Time: 11:00AM to 12:00PM
Location: 32-G449 (Stata Center - Patil/Kiva Conference Room
Host: Regina Barzilay, MIT CSAIL
Contact: Marcia Davidson, 617-253-3049, marcia@csail.mit.edu
Relevant URL: For centuries, scholars have explored the deep links among human languages. In this thesis, we present a class of probabilistic models that exploit these links as a form of naturally occurring supervision. These models allow us to substantially improve performance for core text processing tasks, such as morphological segmentation, part-
of-speech tagging, and syntactic parsing.
Besides these traditional NLP tasks, we also present a multilingual model for lost language decipherment. We test this model on the ancient Ugaritic language. Our results show that we can automatically uncover much of the historical relationship between Ugaritic and Biblical Hebrew, a known related language.
Thesis advisor: Regina Barzilay
Thesis committee: Michael Collins and Tommi Jaakkola
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