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Prof. Daniel Marcu
Computer Science Department, University of Southern California Monday, October 22nd, 218 MLH, 2:30 pm - 3:20pm |
ABSTRACT:
Researchers of natural language have repeatedly acknowledged that
coherent texts are not just simple sequences of sentences. Rather,
they are complex artifacts whose semantic units are connected by
rhetorical, logical, argumentative, and cohesive relations. I discuss
research aimed at uncovering the constraints that characterize the
abstract structure of well-formed texts, and at producing algorithms
for the automatic derivation of these structures. I show how
automatically constructed discourse structures can be exploited in the
context of several applications that range from text summarization to
machine translation and automatic essay scoring.
Prof. Daniel Marcu is
project leader and research scientist at the
Information Sciences Institute and assistant professor of computer
science at the University of Southern California. His published work
is in discourse summarization, translation, generation, and knowledge
representation. His current focus is on developing statistical models
for machine translation and summarization.
(web site: http://www.isi.edu/~marcu/)