Colloquium
"Summarization and Question Answering Using Text-to-Text Generation"
Kathleen McKeown, Department of Computer Science, Columbia University
Thursday, November 8, 2007 at 4:00 P.M.
Room 368 (CIT 3rd Floor)
The past five years have seen the emergence of robust, scalable natural language processing systems that can summarize and answer questions about online material. One key to the success of such systems is that they re-use text that appeared in the documents rather than generating new sentences from scratch. Re-using text is absolutely essential for the development of robust systems; full semantic interpretation of unrestricted text is beyond the state of the art. Better summaries and answers can be produced, however, if systems can generate new sentences from the input text, fusing relevant phrases and discarding irrelevant ones. This new form of language generation, called text-to-text generation, has the potential to enable robust applications that can handle the full range of text which appears on the web.
This talk will present research on summarization and question-answering over a variety of sources, featuring Columbia's Newsblaster system for online news summarization and question answering over a mixed corpus of news, broadcast news, talks shows and blogs. I will show how text-to-text generation can be used to highlight salient information for summarization and to remove irrelevant information when responding to a question. We are also investigating how text-to-text generation can exploit redundancy in multilingual summarization and question-answering scenarios to improve the fluency of translated sentences.
Bio:
Kathleen R. McKeown is the Henry and Gertrude Rothschild Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University. She served as Department Chair from 1998-2003. Her research interests include text summarization, natural language generation, multi-media explanation, digital libraries, concept to speech generation and natural language interfaces. McKeown received the Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania in 1982 and has been at Columbia since then. In 1985 she received a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award, in 1991 she received a National Science Foundation Faculty Award for Women, in 1994 she was selected as a AAAI Fellow, and in 2003 she was elected as an ACM Fellow. She is currently serving as General Conference Chair for ACL08: HLT.
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