[2019] Mirella Lapata will give this year’s Karen Spärck Jones lecture on "Translating from Multiple Modalities to Text and Back" on 23rd October at Imperial College in London. Image Recent years have witnessed the development of a wide range of computational tools that process and generate natural language text. Many of these have become familiar to mainstream computer users in the from of web search, question answering, sentiment analysis, and notably machine translation. The accessibility of the web could be further enhanced with applications that not only translate between different languages (e.g., from English to French) but also within the same language, between different modalities, or different data formats. The web is rife with non-linguistic data (e.g., video, images, source code) that cannot be indexed or searched since most retrieval tools operate over textual data. In her talk Mirella will argue that in order to render electronic data more accessible to individuals and computers alike, new types of translation models need to be developed. I will focus on three examples, text simplification, source code generation, and movie summarization. She will illustrate how recent advances in deep learning can be extended in order to induce general representations for different modalities and learn how to translate between these and natural language. The lecture will be live-streamed on BCS's website. Karen Spärck Jones lecture This lecture is held in honour of Karen Spärck Jones, one of the most remarkable women in computer science. A Fellow of the British Academy, she had a long, rich and remarkable career as a pioneer of information science from the very early days of computing. Related links Karen Spärck Jones lecture Live stream Mirella's personal page This article was published on 2024-03-18
