AI Seminar Series 2022: Bradley Hauer

The AI Seminar is a weekly meeting at the University of Alberta where researchers interested in artificial intelligence (AI) can share their research. Presenters include both local speakers from the University of Alberta and visitors from other institutions. Topics can be related in any way to artificial intelligence, from foundational theoretical work to innovative applications of AI techniques to new fields and problems.

On July 22nd, Bradley Hauer – a pHD candidate at the University of Alberta – presented "Lexical Semantics: Why Theory Matter" at the AI Seminar.

Computational lexical semantics refers to the application of knowledge about word meaning to natural language processing. In his talk, we demonstrate that tasks and resources in lexical semantics benefit from theoretical analysis. He argues that three tasks commonly used to evaluate semantically-aware methods and models are equivalent, enabling data and methods developed for one task to be applied to the others. Second, he explores the linguistic phenomena underlying multilingual semantic resources, and posit that lexicalized concepts are universal, and thus can be annotated cross-linguistically in parallel corpora. He then demonstrates the utility of this theoretical analysis, by showing that it can be applied to automatically generate multilingual data for word sense disambiguation, a key semantic task. Taken together, the work makes the case that theoretical models which humans can understand, interpret, and test, are vital to semantics research

Watch the full presentation below:

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