Thursday 6 October at 14.15, Language Technology research seminar. Visiting Professor Mark Ellison from the University of Cologne will give a talk on NLP and Human Processing: prominence, referring expressions and metaphors. The abstract of the talk is in the following:
Human language has adapted to our associative memory and our pragmatic reasoning. In this talk, I discuss some of these adaptations, and their implications for the machine processing of language, and in particular, referring-expression form. When do we refer to something with a name, a descriptive noun phrase, a pronoun or (in languages where this is possible) zero? I will discuss the extent to which there is a "right" form for a context, and ways in which we can evaluate machine-generated form choices. While the discourse prominence of a referent drives much of this selection, semantic factors - such as metaphoricity - may also limit the referring expressions appropriate for a given context.
Dr. Mark Ellison is a postdoctoral fellow at the DFG Collaborative Research Centre on Prominence in Language, University of Cologne, Germany.
6 October at 14.15-15.45, hybrid event at Metsätalo lecture hall 12 (3rd floor), Unioninkatu 40, and via Zoom.
Read more about the Visiting Professor program.