If you teach a robot to talk…
Brent Woo
Linguistics
We’re living in the future.
..but if we want to talk with computers, not
just at, we have a long way to go.
Speech
signal
Tokenize
Utterance
Structure
Generate
meaning
Speech
signal
Tokenize
Utterance
Structure
Generate
meaning
*
Natural Language Processing
Computer science
Mathematics
…Linguistics
Phonetics
Speech
signal
Python
Tokenize
Syntax
Utterance
Structure
Semantics
Generate
meaning
Phonetics and Phonology
Sound and their organization
jäääärne “on the ice edge” (Estonian)
ǂqhàla ǃāã “long leg” (ǃXóõ)
Phonetics and Phonology
chickpea
Morphology
Words and their structure
Un-lock-able
Vivo/vives/vive
͡tɬiːqˈinuχajadzəwˀaɬ
“I used to be a canoe builder.” (Kwakwaka'wakw)
st͡sʼqʰt͡sʰtʰx
“That’s my animal fat over there.” (Nuxálk)
Syntax
Sentences and their structure
We saw her duck
The old man the boat.
Seattle man left homeless after crack bust
by cop later fired for dishonesty wants state
to pay up
(seattlepi.com, Oct. 3, 2013)
Syntax
we saw her
duck
Semantics
Mapping sentence structure to meaning
RELN pron_rel
PERNUM 3pl
INDEX x1
RELN see
SIT s1
ARG0 x1
ARG1 x2
RELN duck_n
OWNER 3sgf
INDEX x2
(Communication)
“Gwarsh, I’m
famished.
Haven’t eaten
for ages!”
RELN hunger
ARG0 x1
ARG1 x2
INDEX x1
PERNUM 1sg
Pragmatics, Discourse Theory
“That’s
nice.”
Great! So now we understand one sentence!
Syntactician
Approaches to Parsing
Grammar Engineer
Precise
Treebank-trained
Hybrid
Unsupervised
Robust
(Bender 2014)
IF you teach a robot to talk…
…then let me know!
Time’s Up!
• About you:
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Name: Brent Woo
Department: Linguistics
Email: [email protected]
URL: brent.pw
Quick bio: I live on a steady diet of french press
coffee and post-rock.