{"629437":{"#nid":"629437","#data":{"type":"event","title":"IC Guest Seminar with Wei Xu, Ohio State University","body":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003EThe School of Interactive Computing is hosting a guest seminar from Wei Xu, an assistant professor in Computer Science and Engineering at Ohio State University.\u003C\/p\u003E\r\n\r\n\u003Cp\u003E\u003Cstrong\u003ETitle:\u003C\/strong\u003E Understanding and Generating Human Language\u003Cbr \/\u003E\r\n\u003Cbr \/\u003E\r\n\u003Cstrong\u003EAbstract:\u003C\/strong\u003E Human language is notoriously complex due to the multitude of ways people can express the same\u0026nbsp;meaning. In this talk, I will present two series of work on machine learning methods to understand the varied\u0026nbsp;expressions in human language and to generate paraphrases for applications, such as reading and writing assistive\u0026nbsp;technology. In the first part, I will showcase how to design learning and ranking models for natural language\u0026nbsp;generation, including a new metric that has been widely adopted as a learning objective and evaluation method.\u0026nbsp;In the second part, I will present new datasets and a class of pairwise models for learning textural expressions that\u0026nbsp;convey the same meaning. In contrast to previous work, we focus on extracting paraphrases on a much larger\u0026nbsp;scale and with a much broader range by developing more robust models, leveraging social media data and\u0026nbsp;crowdsourcing. I will also briefly discuss the connections of my work to computational social science, language\u0026nbsp;and code, and human language instructions. \u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u003Cbr \/\u003E\r\n\u003Cbr \/\u003E\r\n\u003Cstrong\u003EBio:\u003C\/strong\u003E Wei Xu is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Ohio State\u0026nbsp;University. Her research interests include machine learning, natural language processing, and social media. Her\u0026nbsp;recent work focuses on natural language generation for educational applications and semantic similarity models\u0026nbsp;for language understanding. She has also worked on crowdsourcing, summarization, and information extraction\u0026nbsp;for user-generated data, such as Twitter and StackOverflow. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from New\u0026nbsp;York University and was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. She received an NSF CRII\u0026nbsp;Award, a Best Paper Award at COLING 2018, CrowdFlower AI for Everyone Award, Criteo Faculty Research Award,\u0026nbsp;as well as research funds from DARPA and IARPA. She is currently a senior area chair for ACL 2020 and has served\u0026nbsp;as an area chair, workshop chair, and publicity chair for ACL, EMNLP, NAACL conferences, and as a co-organizer for\u0026nbsp;the annual Workshop on Noisy User-generated Text since 2015.\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/p\u003E\r\n","summary":null,"format":"limited_html"}],"field_subtitle":"","field_summary":"","field_summary_sentence":[{"value":"The School of Interactive Computing is hosting a guest seminar from Wei Xu, an assistant professor in Computer Science and Engineering at Ohio State University."}],"uid":"34773","created_gmt":"2019-11-27 14:50:53","changed_gmt":"2019-11-27 14:50:53","author":"ablinder6","boilerplate_text":"","field_publication":"","field_article_url":"","field_event_time":{"event_time_start":"2019-12-03T11:00:00-05:00","event_time_end":"2019-12-03T12:00:00-05:00","event_time_end_last":"2019-12-03T12:00:00-05:00","gmt_time_start":"2019-12-03 16:00:00","gmt_time_end":"2019-12-03 17:00:00","gmt_time_end_last":"2019-12-03 17:00:00","rrule":null,"timezone":"America\/New_York"},"extras":[],"hg_media":{"629436":{"id":"629436","type":"image","title":"Wei Xu","body":null,"created":"1574866033","gmt_created":"2019-11-27 14:47:13","changed":"1574866033","gmt_changed":"2019-11-27 14:47:13","alt":"Wei Xu","file":{"fid":"239703","name":"Unknown.png","image_path":"\/sites\/default\/files\/images\/Unknown_21.png","image_full_path":"http:\/\/www.tlwarc.hg.gatech.edu\/\/sites\/default\/files\/images\/Unknown_21.png","mime":"image\/png","size":529624,"path_740":"http:\/\/www.tlwarc.hg.gatech.edu\/sites\/default\/files\/styles\/740xx_scale\/public\/images\/Unknown_21.png?itok=6CTQ8B3D"}}},"media_ids":["629436"],"groups":[{"id":"47223","name":"College of Computing"},{"id":"576481","name":"ML@GT"},{"id":"50876","name":"School of Interactive Computing"}],"categories":[],"keywords":[],"core_research_areas":[],"news_room_topics":[],"event_categories":[{"id":"1795","name":"Seminar\/Lecture\/Colloquium"}],"invited_audience":[{"id":"78761","name":"Faculty\/Staff"},{"id":"177814","name":"Postdoc"},{"id":"78771","name":"Public"},{"id":"174045","name":"Graduate students"},{"id":"78751","name":"Undergraduate students"}],"affiliations":[],"classification":[],"areas_of_expertise":[],"news_and_recent_appearances":[],"phone":[],"contact":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003EDavid Mitchell\u003C\/p\u003E\r\n\r\n\u003Cp\u003ECommunications Officer II\u003C\/p\u003E\r\n\r\n\u003Cp\u003Edavid.mitchell@cc.gatech.edu\u003C\/p\u003E\r\n","format":"limited_html"}],"email":[],"slides":[],"orientation":[],"userdata":""}}}