• Present a group of interesting conference papers to the group
• Brainstorming on tools that the group has found useful and reporting back on experiences. Tools mentioned included: GATE, NLTK and Python (and many more that I did not get the change to note down, sorry :( - feel free to complete the list. Also as part of the tools discussion, it was mentioned that it could be useful for the group and the students to set up a Virtual Machine that we can use to run tools across different OS.
• Bayesian models/latent models
• Presentation of TREC results (Udo/Dyaa)

Language and Computation Day

Week One, Friday, 8th October 2010, all day - 3.320

Details available from the LAC 2010 page

Week 2

Wednesday, 13th October 2010, 10-11pm - 4.336

Meeting held to decide timing and topics of LAC meetings during the Autumn Term.

The time convenient for most present, was Thursdays 12-1pm or Thursdays 4pm-5pm (with a preference on the first slot), both followed by coffee/lunch/drinks (depending on the hour) somewhere on campus, starting from Thursday 28th October and meeting weekly.

Could those not present let the group know if the times suggested are convenient, by emailing the list?

The topics that we thought would be interesting to look at this term were added at the top of this page.

Massimo will lead the first meeting, suggesting papers to the group to read (links and further information to appear soon on this page).

Week 3

Thursday, 21th October 2010
No meeting this week.

Week 4

Thursday, 28th October 2010, 12pm-1pm in 3.410

Massimo will lead the first meeting, discussing the following paper:

Edgar Meij , Marc Bron , Laura Hollink , Bouke Huurnink , Maarten De Rijke. Learning Semantic Query Suggestions. [citeseerX record] [pdf]

Week 5

Thusday, 4th November 2010, 12pm-1pm in 3.410

Virtual Machines for NLE.

Dyaa to give a demo of a virtual machine. Discussion of tools that could be installed on a LAC group virtual machine to provide a common NLE development environment. This would allow people to use and share a common environment without being obliged to install, upgrade or downgrade packages installed on their own machines, and without having to install a particular host operating system.

For some general information on virtual machines, see for example VirtualBox and VMware. Other virtual machines are available, but many are either not "free" or do not run under MS Windows. For licensing reasons, pre-packaged virtual machines typically run a "free" operating system, such as Linux or some version of BSD. Many virtual machines, such as VirtualBox and VMware, can host MS Windows. This may be covered by the University's site licence. Although technically it may be possible to do so, Apple does not allow its operating systems to be installed in a virtual machine.

Week 6

Thursday, 11th November 2010, 12pm-1pm in 3.410

Review a selection of ACL 2010 papers

Deirdre - P10-1138 : Celina Santamaría; Julio Gonzalo; Javier Artiles
Wikipedia as Sense Inventory to Improve Diversity in Web Search Results [pdf]

Kakia - P10-1107 : Benjamin Snyder; Regina Barzilay; Kevin Knight
A Statistical Model for Lost Language Decipherment [pdf]

Week 7

Thursday, 18th November 2010, 12pm-1pm in 3.410

Review a selection of ACL 2010 papers

Dyaa - P10-2068 : David Vickrey; Oscar Kipersztok; Daphne Koller
An Active Learning Approach to Finding Related Terms [pdf]

Jon - P10-1030 : Fei Wu and Daniel S. Weld
Open Information Extraction Using Wikipedia [pdf]

Week 8

Thursday, 25th November 2010,12pm-1pm in 3.410

We reviewed selected papers for an upcoming Information retrieval conference.

Week 9

Thursday, 2nd December 2010, 12pm-1pm in 3.410

Dyaa could take us through the session track results for TREC 2010 or we can carry on reviewing papers with Udo. Or we can come up with something else.

Kakia could present (now or in the future) an overview or selected papers from the NAACL HLT 2010 Fifth Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications: http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W/W10/#1000 or the Proceedings of the 2010 Workshop on NLP and Linguistics: Finding the Common Ground http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W/W10/W10-21.pdf

Please put your suggestions on the wiki.

Week 10

Thursday, 9th December 2010, 12pm-1pm in 3.410

Invited talk by Andrew Anderson, UCL
"On measuring covariation in speech production".

Abstract

Over the past 15 years measures of speech motor variability in repetitions of the same utterance have become popular in: indexing the severity of motor disorders; charting development and aging; and probing how experimental manipulations (e.g. linguistic complexity, speech speed) tax the production process. Although they have been successful in teasing out differences between experimental groups, measures of variability have been crude in the following senses: They tend to focus on a single or small subset of elements contributing to speech production (most commonly lower lip displacement); They tend not to take into account spatial and temporal components of variation (that can to an extent be modified independently in production); Where covariation across effectors has been measured, this has almost exclusively been based on point wise comparisons (e.g. covariation in the timing of turning points across effectors).

There is intuitive motivation to move to a more holistic analysis of production, taking into account continuous activity in as many components as can be measured. This talk: grounds this motivation in experimental data; shows how Functional Data Analysis (statistical methods focusing on analysing curves) can be extended to derive continuous measures of spatio- temporal synchronisation and asynchrony across multiple effectors; considers how non-invasive audio/visual and MRI can be applied to measure joint activity conventionally measured invasively. Outlines MATLAB software packages written by the author to allow non-specialised users to undertake complex analyses of biomechanics with point and click graphical means.

Week 11

Thursday, 16th December 2010, 12pm-1pm in 3.410

Weeks 16 -18

no meetings

Week 19

Thursday, 10th February 2011, 1pm-2pm in 3.407
Spring term planning meeting: We agreed that 1-2pm was a convenient time for most and that Kakia would be booking a room (the same or any in this corridor if possible) for future meetings.

The group agreed that the topic that Bayesian models is and interesting topic to look into for this term, and for that, we will be going through the chapters of the following book: Title tbc, Dafne Koller

Other resources to look into suggested in the meeting include:

• Collective Intelligence book (reference to be confirmed)
• WEKA tools for visualising bayesian methods

Week 20

Thursday, 17th February 2011, 1pm-2pm in 3.407
At TREC 2010 Essex submitted a run to the Session Track. Dyaa will be giving an overview of the track, the Essex submissions and present the results. The working paper included in the TREC notes can be found here: [http://www.sci.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~jniu/research/publications/files/albakour-trec10-session.track.pdf

Week 21

Thursday, 24th February 2011, 1pm-2pm in 3.411

(note the change of room)

Starting this week we will read through the chapters of the following book:

Daphne Koller and Nir Friedman. (2009). Probabilistic Graphical Models:
Principles and Techniques. MIT Press. [book site]

We started this week with the first chapter (introduction).

Week 22

Thursday, 3rd March 2011, 1pm-2pm in 3.411
This week Mahmoud and Roseline are presenting CLUTO, a cross-platform graphical application for clustering low-high dimensional datasets.

More information about CLUTO are available here: http://glaros.dtc.umn.edu/gkhome/views/cluto

Roseline's presentation

Mahmoud's presentation

Week 23

Thursday, 10th March 2011, 1pm-2pm in 3.411
No meetings this week.

Week 24

Thursday, 17th March 2011, 1pm-2pm in 3.411
We are reading the first half of chapter 3 of the Koller and Friedman (2009) book "The Bayesian Network Representation" (sections 3.1 and 3.2). Deirdre to lead the discussion.

Spreadsheet implementation of figure 3.4, pp.53 of Koller and Friedman (2009) (.ods Open Office Spreadsheet format)
(.xls MS Excel Spreadsheet format)

More information on how to get the chapter were circulated in the LAC group list.

Week 25

Thursday, 24th March 2011, 1pm-2pm in 3.411
We are reading the second half of chapter 3 of the Koller and Friedman (2009) book "The Bayesian Network Representation" (sections 3.3 and 3.4). Dyaa lead the discussion.

Week 26 (Easter Vacation)

Thursday, 31st March 2011, 1pm-2pm in 3.409
We are reading the remainder of second half of chapter 3 (sections 3.3 and 3.4). Dyaa and Deirdre lead the discussion.

Week 27 (Easter Vacation)

Thursday, 7th April 2011, 1pm-2pm in 3.409
No meeting this week.

Week 30

no meetings

Week 31

Thursday, 5th May 2011, 1pm-2pm in 5B.105
We are reading section 3.4.3.1 of the PGM book onwards. We have also agreed to present one exercise each from the list of exercises on page 96 onwards, as follows:

Week 32

Thursday, 12th May 2011, 1pm-2pm in 5B.105
We worked on with exercise 3.5.

Week 33

Thursday, 19th May 2011, 1pm-2pm in 5A.108
We will carry on with the rest of exercises.

Week 34

Thursday, 26th May 2011, 1pm-2pm in 5A.108
no meeting this week

Week 35

Thursday, 2nd June 2011, 1pm-2pm in 5A.108
no meeting this week

Week 36

Thursday, 9th June 2011, 1pm-2pm in 5A.108

Invited talk by Dr. Kamaran Fathulla, IA, Essex
"A richer understanding of Bayesian Network Diagrams"

Abstract
This talk introduces a richer approach for understanding Bayesian Network Diagrams. The approach states that diagrams including Bayesian types have an underling higher level structure that transcends their application specifics. The way to identify these structures requires a departure from the limitations of our existing reductionist ways of understanding diagrams. The suggested approach treats diagrams as real world entities functioning in a number of Aspects. The Spatial and Symbolic Aspects are considered as the ones needed to elegantly capture the meaning of diagrams and distinguish them from other types of entities. The way the two Aspects are manipulated to generate a number of meta modes of diagrams is discussed. Aided by these modes a rethink of Bayesian type diagrams is worked out. The topic is clearly rooted in philosophy so a short introduction of the philosophical underpinnings is introduced.

Talk slides

Additional papers:

• http://www.stevens.edu/jnickerson/CogSci2009Diagnosis_final.pdf
• http://www.idi.ntnu.no/emner/it3704/lectures/papers/AIMag12-04-007.pdf