Expert to Expert: Natural Language and Computational Linguistics (Channel 9)

Expert to Expert: Natural Language and Computational Linguistics

Posted: Oct 22, 2008 at 11:34 AM

By: Charles

(6)

188,898 Views

6 Comments

Video format

Option selected may change based on video formats available and browser capability.

Auto

Use our suggested format for this video.

Smooth Streaming

Adaptive bitrate streaming - little buffering but lower video quality at times of low bandwidth. Silverlight 5 required

Progressive

Traditional buffered video format. Silverlight 5 required

HTML5

For browsers that support H.264 MP4 or WebM video playback such as:
IE9+, Firefox 4+, Chrome 5+, or Safari 4+.

Flash

For browsers that have the Adobe Flash Player plugin installed.

Ever wonder what it takes to compute language (language in this case refers to what we humans speak and or/write)? From Wikipedia: Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field dealing with the statistical and/or rule-based modeling of natural language from a computational perspective. This modeling is not limited to any particular field of linguistics. Traditionally, computational linguistics was usually performed by computer scientists who had specialized in the application of computers to the processing of a natural language. Computational linguists often work as members of interdisciplinary teams, including linguists (specifically trained in linguistics), language experts (persons with some level of ability in the languages relevant to a given project), and computer scientists. In general computational linguistics draws upon the involvement of linguists, computer scientists, experts in artificial intelligence, cognitive psychologists, mathematicians, and logicians, amongst others.

Here, we meet some of the scientists in Microsoft Research who work on computational linguistics. The great Erik Meijer conducts the interview. Special guests are: Researchers Chris Quirk, Michael Gamon and Lucy Vanderwende. This is a great Expert to Expert since the Experts in this case are from different domains of expertise (Erik is a programming language specialist. The scientists Erik converses with are specialists in natural language computation, linguisitics and mathematics). This is a fascinating conversation that spans topics from natural language processing to computing understanding (Yes. AI comes up...).

Enjoy!

Follow the Discussion

Oops, something didn't work.

Try again?

Getting "follow" information

Stop following these comments

Start following these comments

Removing your "follow"

Setting up your "follow"

Subscribe to this comments

Follow
Oops, something didn't work.

Try again?

Sign In to be begin to follow these comments

What does this mean?
Following an item on Channel 9 allows you to watch for new content and comments that you are interested in. You need to be signed in to Channel 9 to use this feature.

Getting "follow" information

Stop following these comments

Start following these comments

What does this mean?
Following an item on Channel 9 allows you to watch for new content and comments that you are interested in and view them all on your notifications page.

Removing your "follow"

Setting up your "follow"

Did you know you can
sign up for email notifications?
- Subscribe to this comments

ChrisStepaniuk

Oct 22, 2008 at 5:31 PM

Charles,

You forgot to post the link in the show notes

Cheers!
Charles Welcome Change

Oct 22, 2008 at 5:46 PM

What do you mean by link?
Maddus Mattus Maddus on C9, Is often controversial, But fun none-the-less -evildictaitor

Oct 22, 2008 at 11:34 PM

Even more Erik!

I remember wishing for more videos with Erik, but this is beyond my wildest dreams, thanks C9 team!

Nice shirt again Erik
elmer I'm on my very last life.

Oct 23, 2008 at 3:48 AM

The translation website they talked about.
Charles Welcome Change

Oct 23, 2008 at 9:00 AM

http://www.windowslivetranslator.com for translation service. http://www.eslassistant.com for English as a second language (prototype).
C
Jsoh :::Windows 8 Style UI :::

Oct 25, 2008 at 2:08 PM

Looking at the speed that children pickup language, I wonder if the exposure to short children's stories ,as a corpus of understanding, assists in this rapid adoption of language. I would bet that a few thousand exposures to these stories would define the trunk branches, in the forest of perception, better than a million nytimes articles. I believe this partially because children's stories are strait forward and have minimal dependencies on external context.

Remove this comment

Remove this thread

Comments Closed

Comments have been closed since this content was published more than 30 days ago, but if you'd like to continue the conversation, please create a new thread in our Forums,
or Contact Us and let us know.