Advanced Lecture Series in Pattern Recognition

题     目 (TITLE)：Studying Recurrent Neural Networks for Natural Language Processing

讲 座 人 (SPEAKER)：Prof. Kevin Knight (DiDi Chuxing)

主 持 人 (CHAIR)：Prof. Chengqing Zong

时     间 (TIME)：10:00am, May 23 (Thursday), 2019

地     点 (VENUE)：No.1 Conference Room (3rd floor), Intelligence Building

报告摘要（ABSTRACT）：

Recently, recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have been revolutionizing natural language processing and other fields. Among other things, RNNs can assign probabilities to sequences (such as Chinese sentences) and transform one sequence into another (such as Chinese into Japanese). I will describe some of our work over the past couple of years, addressing four questions: What are neural sequence models learning? How can they learn better? Are there theoretical limits? Can they be creative?

报告人简介（BIOGRAPHY）：

Kevin Knight is Chief Scientist for Natural Language Processing (NLP) at DiDi Chuxing. He leads a DiDi lab in Los Angeles devoted to NLP research. He was previously Dean's Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southern California (USC) and a Research Director and Fellow at USC's Information Sciences Institute (ISI). He received a PhD in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University and a bachelor's degree from Harvard University. Dr. Knight's research interests include human-machine communication, machine translation, language generation, automata theory, and decipherment. He has co-authored over 150 research papers on natural language processing, including one outstanding paper award at NAACL 2018 and one best demonstration award at ACL 2018. Dr. Knight also co-authored the widely-adopted textbook "Artificial Intelligence" (McGraw-Hill). In 2001, he co-founded Language Weaver, Inc., a machine translation company acquired by SDL plc in 2010. Dr. Knight was a key researcher in programs run by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). He served as President of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) in 2011, as General Chair for the Annual Conference of the ACL in 2005, and as General Chair for the North American ACL conference in 2016. He is a Fellow of the ACL, a Fellow of ISI, and a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).