Tuesday, March 29, 12:30-1:45 PM
MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library B0135

“Teaching Machines to Read Milton: Natural Language Processing Challenges for Literary and Historical Texts” by TRAVIS BROWN

Many popular natural language processing techniques and tools rely on annotated training corpora to learn models that can be used to process new data from a similar domain. We can train a parser on Wall Street Journal text from the Penn Treebank, for example, and expect it to perform reasonably well on recent blog posts or movie reviews, but not necessarily on eighteenth-century conduct manuals. Unfortunately it’s often hard to find or create appropriate training data for specific literary genres or historical periods, even in English. In this talk Travis Brown, Research & Development Software Developer at MITH, will look at some examples of semi-supervised and unsupervised methods that can be used to explore large text collections in domains with little or no available training data.

TRAVIS BROWN is a Research & Development Software Developer at MITH. He holds an M.A. in English from the University of Texas at Austin and is beginning a dissertation on the use of digital tools and methods in literary studies. While at the University of Texas he worked as an editor for the Walt Whitman Archive and was the lead developer of eComma, a web application for collaborative textual annotation. He also participated in a range of projects in UT’s Computational Linguistics Lab, where he developed tools for dependency parsing, semantic role labeling, and toponym resolution. He is particularly interested in using techniques from computational linguistics to aid in the exploration and visualization of large collections of literary and historical texts.

A continuously updated schedule of talks is also available on the Digital Dialogues webpage.

Unable to attend the events in person? Archived podcasts can be found on the MITH website, and you can follow our Digital Dialogues Twitter account @digdialog as well as the Twitter hashtag #mithdd to keep up with live tweets from our sessions.

All talks free and open to the public! Refreshments are often provided but attendees are welcome to bring their own lunches.

Contact: Neil Fraistat, Director, MITH (http://mith.umd.edu, mith@umd.edu, 5-8927).