Guest Speaker Eneko Agirre

Prof. Dr. Eneko Agirre will give an LKE/KDSL Invited Talk on February 3rd, 2015. The talk will take place at 10:00 in S2|02 B002.

Title: Text Understanding using Knowledge-Bases and Random Walks

Abstract:

One of the key challenges for creating the semantic representation of a text is mapping words found in a natural language text to their meanings. This task, Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD), is confounded by the fact that words have multiple meanings, or senses, dictated by their use in a sentence and the domain. We present an algorithm that employs random walks over the graph structure of knowledge bases, yielding state-of-the-art results for WSD on both general and biomedical texts, as well as in Named-Entity Disambiguation. We also show that the same algorithm can be successfully applied to Word Similarity and to enrich texts with related concepts, yielding improvements in Information Retrieval.

Bio:

Eneko Agirre received his PhD (1999) and B.A. (1990) in Computer Science by the University of the Basque Country, and is Associate Professor in the Computer Science Faculty there since 2005. He received his MSc. in Knowledge-Based Systems by Edinburgh University (1991). He has published over 150 international peer-reviewd articles and conference papers in Natural Language Processing, mainly in the areas of Lexical Knowledge Acquisition, Word Sense Disambiguation and Semantic Processing. He has been secretary and president of the ACL SIGLEX and member of the editorial board of Computational Linguistics. He is co-founder of the Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM), now in it's third edition. He is a usual reviewer for top international journals including LRE, NLE, JSL, ACM CS, ACM TOIS and IEEE IS. He is a regular area chair and member of the program committees for top international conferences like GWC, ACL, EACL, NAACL, IJCNLP, HLT, CONLL, TSD, RANLP, EMNLP, AAAI and IJCAI. He has lead the local team in several European projects.