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Squeezing theory into practice: automata in natural language processing

Speaker(s)
Aleksander Zabłocki
Affiliation
Uniwersytet Warszawski
Date
June 19, 2013, 2:15 p.m.
Room
room 5870
Seminar
Seminar Automata Theory

I will sketch some aspects of using automata in natural language processing: more precisely, in efficient applying a set of search-replace rules for richly annotated text. Although this might seem trivial (build-determinize-compose-run
), our practical applications require considering how to:
- avoid explosion of states,
- determinize at all,
- deal with ambiguity in the input, and
- more generally, choose between word and tree automata (as our input lies somehow between the two).
Our motivation is practical: we do not fight for decidability and even not much for asymptotics, but rather for good constants, under some particular assumptions.