NSF East Asia and Pacific Summer Institute for FY 2012 in Japan

Narad Jason R, Fulton NY

Investigators

Abstract

This action funds Jason Narad of the University of Massachusetts Amherst to conduct a research project entitled "Improving relation extraction through marginalization of hidden syntactic structure," during the summer of 2012 at the Nara Institute of Science and Technology in Ikoma, Nara, Japan. The host scientist is Professor Yuji Matsumoto. The Intellectual Merit of the research project is to provide a general framework for performing syntax-dependent natural language processing (NLP) tasks in resource-poor languages. This research focuswa on relation extraction, a subfield of NLP, which aims to uncover and categorize the relationships between entities (people, places, organizations) from unstructured text. The most successful approaches to this problem rely on syntactic annotation which is unavailable for many languages and costly to produce. The research uses an alternative approach which alleviates this requirement by instead learning a syntax-like scaffolding as a set of latent variables in a graphical model. Broader Impacts of an EAPSI fellowship include providing the Fellow a first-hand research experience outside the U.S.; an introduction to the science, science policy, and scientific infrastructure of the respective location; and an orientation to the society, culture and language. These activities meet the NSF goal to educate for international collaborations early in the career of its scientists, engineers, and educators, thus ensuring a globally aware U.S. scientific workforce.