NLP@Pitt

[Supervised and Unsupervised Methods in Employing Discourse Relations for Improving Opinion Polarity Classification]

PRESENTER: Swapna Somasundaran

WHEN: Tuesday 6/30/9, 3-4 pm

WHERE: Senott Square Rm 6329

Abstract

This work investigates design choices in modeling a discourse scheme for improving opinion polarity classification. For this, two diverse global inference paradigms are used: a supervised collective classification framework and an unsupervised optimization framework. The approaches perform substantially better than the baseline, establishing the efficacy of both the methods and the underlying discourse scheme. We also present quantitative and qualitative analyses showing how the improvements are achieved. (This paper is to be presented at EMNLP-2009.)

[A Selected Tour of NLP in the British Isles]

PRESENTER: Prof. Diane Litman, CS & LRDC

WHEN: Tuesday 6/9/9, 3-4pm

ABSTRACT

I will first give an idiosyncratic overview of NLP in the UK, based on my visits to York, Oxford, Sheffield, Aberdeen, the Open U, Cambridge, Ulster, and Dublin City Universities during my sabbatical.

I will also briefly describe my joint research with Johanna Moore's group at the University of Edinburgh, which investigates whether previous findings and methods in the area of tutorial dialogue can be generalized across dialogue corpora that differ in domain (physics versus electricity), modality (spoken versus typed), and tutor type (human versus computer)