Public Lecture in Language Technology December 8, 2010

Casey Whitelaw (Google Inc, Sydney)
Language Technology: A View from the Trenches

This event is part of the Australasian Language Technology Workshop
http://www.alta.asn.au/events/alta2010/index.html

Where:
ICT Building, Theatre 3
University of Melbourne
111 Barry Street
Carlton
VIC 3053

When:
Thursday 9 December 2010
2:00-3:00

Abstract

Computers that can listen and talk? Helpers that read your books and
answer complex questions? Natural language processing has always made big promises, and has left many people with a healthy dose of
skepticism. The truth is that language technology has had a bigger
impact than you may think, by working behind the scenes. In this
talk, I will discuss the changing role of NLP in applications, and the
trends I have observed over the last 5 years with my work at Google. I
will be focusing on the practicalities of applying NLP techniques to
real-world problems, avoiding common pitfalls, and learning from our
most valuable resource: our users.

Bio

Casey Whitelaw is a software engineer and computational linguist, with a background in applied machine learning. At Google New York, Casey worked in the areas of question answering, named entity
classification, and information extraction. He moved back to Sydney to
be part of Google Wave, where one of his projects was Wave's spelling correction system. His interests are in the practical application of NLP and machine learning techniques to web-scale problems, especially around semi-structured information.

Casey submitted his thesis, "Systemic Features for Text
Classification" to the University of Sydney in 2005. Before joining
Google, Casey has been a visiting scholar at the Illinois Institute of
Technology, working with Shlomo Argamon, and was an intern with the Natural Language Processing Group at Microsoft Research.