CS Colloquium

Monday, February 26

4:00 p.m., AKW 200 (coffee & cookies at 3:45)

Speaker: Danqi Chen, Stanford University

Title: Knowledge from Deep Understanding of Language

Host: Dragomir Radev

Abstract:

Almost all of humanity’s knowledge is now available online, but the vast majority of it is principally encoded in the form of human language explanations. In this talk, I explore novel neural network or deep learning approaches that open up increased opportunities for getting a deep understanding of natural language text. First, I show how distributed representations enabled the building of a smaller, faster, better dependency parser for finding the structure of human language sentences. Then I show how related neural technologies can be used to improve the construction of knowledge bases from text. However, maybe we don’t need this intermediate step and can directly gain knowledge and answer people’s questions from large textbases? In the third part, I explore doing this by looking at a simple but highly effective neural architecture for question answering.

Bio:

Danqi Chen is a PhD student in Computer Science at Stanford
University, working with Christopher Manning on deep learning approaches to Natural Language Processing. Her research centers on how computers can achieve a deep understanding of human language and the information it contains. Danqi received Outstanding Paper Awards at ACL 2016 and EMNLP 2017, a Facebook Fellowship, a Microsoft Research Women’s Fellowship and an Outstanding Course Assistant Award from Stanford. She holds a B.E. with honors from Tsinghua University.