The Computational Linguistics Lab seminars are currently held as part of the Cognitive Science Group series, and take place at 12 noon on Wednesdays – usually in the meeting room on the middle floor of the ITL on the Mile End campus, but currently online via Zoom. They consist of a variety of activities, including talks from external speakers, presentations from group members, and less structured discussions of topics in the field.
In addition to our regularly scheduled meetings, we occasionally host speakers at different times (and in conjunction with other labs and groups at Queen Mary). Regular meetings, invited talks, and other activities relevant to the lab are listed here.
You can sign up to the mailing list for seminar announcements here.
Lecture series June 2020: “Deep learning and linguistic representation”
In June 2020, Professor Shalom Lappin is giving a 5-part lecture series on deep learning and the nature of linguistic representation; the series is offered primarily to University of Gothenburg CLASP students, but QMUL members and others are welcome to join. The lectures will be online via Zoom; please contact Prof Lappin directly for the link.
| Date | Room | Speaker | Title |
| 02/06/2020 13:15 BST | Online | Shalom Lappin, QMUL/CLASP | Introduction to Deep Learning in NLP |
| 04/06/2020 13:15 BST | Online | Shalom Lappin, QMUL/CLASP | Learning Syntactic Properties with Deep Neural Networks |
| 09/06/2020 13:15 BST | Online | Shalom Lappin, QMUL/CLASP | Machine Learning and the Sentence Acceptability Task |
| 11/06/2020 09:15 BST | Online | Shalom Lappin, QMUL/CLASP | Predicting Human Acceptability Judgments in Context |
| 12/06/2020 13:15 BST | Online | Shalom Lappin, QMUL/CLASP | Cognitively Viable Computational Models of Linguistic Knowledge |
Seminars for 2018-19
| Date | Room | Speaker, Topic, or Activity | Title |
| 14/05/2019 14:00 | ITL top floor | Juntao Yu, QMUL | The howhy theoretical seminar, practical NLP sessions: A neural machine translation system using a sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) model and an attention mechanism. |
| 30/04/2019 14:00 | Room 1.02.3 Bancroft building | Silviu Paun, QMUL | The howhy theoretical seminar: The EM algorithm. General presentation and practical example |
| 02/04/2019 12:30 | ITL top floor | Juntao Yu, QMUL | The howhy theoretical seminar, practical NLP sessions: Building a coreference system from scratch |
| 20/03/2019 12 PM | ITL | Shauna Concannon, York | “Alexa, are you for real?”: Epistemic Status in Human-Agent Dialogues |
| 27/03/2019 12 PM | ITL | Derya Çokal, QMUL | Linguistically Profiling Schizophrenia with/without Formal Thought Disorder |
| 11/02/2019 12 PM | GC205 | Arash Eshghi, Heriot-Watt | Feedback Relevance Spaces: The Organisation of Increments in Conversation |
| 03/12/2018 1 PM | ITL | Julian Hough, QMUL | FLUID: Improving Fluidity in Human-Robot Interaction with Speech Interfaces |
| 12/11/2018 1 PM | ITL | Stephen McGregor, Ecole Normale Supérieure de Paris | Are Computers Really Suited for Processing Natural Language? Recent Experiments in Grounded Language Learning |
| 15/10/2018 1 PM | ITL | Gijs Wijnholds, QMUL | Non-Linear Composition in Distributional Semantics: Modelling Ellipsis, Anaphora and Structural Ambiguities |
| 05/10/2018 4 PM | ITL | Dimitri Kartsaklis, University of Cambridge | Mapping Text to Knowledge Graph Entities using Multi-Sense LSTMs |
| 19/09/2018 2 PM | ITL | Reinhard Muskens, University of Tilburg | Lambdas for Compositional Distributional Semantics |
| 28/05/2018 11 AM | ITL | Raffaella Bernardi, University of Trento | Learning quantification from images: A structured neural architecture |
| 18/05/2018 2 PM | ITL | Milica Gašić, University of Cambridge | Deep reinforcement learning for dialogue policy optimisation |
| 26/03/2018 2 PM | ITL | Shalom Lappin, GU | Modelling the Influence of Document Context on Human Acceptability Judgements |
| 19/03/2018 2 PM | ITL | Maximilian Droog Hayes, QMUL | Lost the Plot: a Cognitively Inspired Approach to Creative Summarization |
| 05/02/2018 2 PM | ITL | Silviu Paun, QMUL | Comparing Bayesian Models of Annotation |
| 22/01/2018 2 PM | ITL | Julian Hough, QMUL | Deep Learning Approaches to Incremental Disfluency Detection |
Past Seminars
Summer Seminars 2017
| Date | Room | Speaker, Topic, or Activity | Title |
| 13/6/2017 2 PM | Bancroft Road Teaching Room BR 4.02 | Elizabeth Black, King’s College, and Steffen Zschaler, King’s College | Can we use Agent Dialogue as a Tool for Capturing Software Design Discussions? |
Seminars for Winter Term 2017
Further Back
| 6/12/2016 5 PM | ITL | Maria Liakata, University of Warwick | Sensing well-being using heterogeneous smartphone data and stance identification in social media conversations |
| 29/11/2016 5 PM | ITL | Open Discussion on Compositional Distributional Semantics and Dynamic Syntax | |
| 22/11/2016 5 PM | ITL | Ruth Kempson, King’s College | Exploring the nesting of Dynamic Syntax within the Predictive Processing Perspective |
| 21/11/2016 1 PM | ITL | Elisabetta Ježek, University of Pavia | Stretching the Meaning of Words: Context-Sensitive Lexical Semantics and Compositionality |
| 15/11/2016 5 PM | ITL | Dimitri Kartsaklis, Matthew Purver, and Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh, Queen Mary | Verb Phrase Ellipsis Using Frobenius Algebras in Categorical Compositional Distributional Semantics |
| 14/11/2016 1 PM | ITL | Arash Eshghi, Heriot-Watt University | BABBLE: Automatically inducing incremental dialogue systems from minimal data |
| 8/11/2016 5 PM | ITL | Gijs Wijnholds, Queen Mary | A Proof-Theoretic Approach to Composition in Distributional Models of Meaning |
| 1/11/2016 5 PM | ITL | Group Meeting | General Discussion |
| 25/10/2016 6 PM | Senate House, Senate Room | Field Trip: Part 3 of Andy Clark’s Chandaria Lectures | Lecture 3: The Future of Prediction |
| 21/10/2016 6 PM | Senate House, Senate Room | Field Trip: Part 2 of Andy Clark’s Chandaria Lectures | Lecture 2: Busting Out – Two Takes on the Predictive Brain |
| 18/10/2016 6 PM | Senate House, Senate Room | Field Trip: Part 1 of Andy Clark’s Chandaria Lectures | Lecture 1: Prediction Machines |
| 29/6/2016 | GO Jones:LG 1 | Distinguished Lecturer: Shalom Lappin, University of Gothenburg | Deep Learning and Semantic Interpretation |
| 15/3/2016 | ArtsTwo 3.16 | Alexander Clark, King’s College London | Grammaticality, Acceptability and Probability: Some Modeling Experiments |
| 2/3/2016 | BR3.02 | Distinguished Lecturer: Bob Coecke, University of Oxford | From Quantum Foundations to Natural Language Meaning via Diagrams |
| 1/3/2016 | ITL | Miroslav Batchkarov, University of Sussex | Evaluating Distributional Models of Compositional Semantics |
| 23/2/2016 | ArtsTwo 2.17 | Pablo Gervás, Universidad Complutense de Madrid | Customizing Automated Story Generator for Constructing Plots for Musicals |
| 3/2/2016 | BR3.02 | Distinguished Lecturer: Mark Steedman, University of Edinburgh | Robust Semantics for Natural Language Processing |
| 26/1/2016 | ArtsTwo 3.16 | Julie Weeds, University of Sussex | An Alternative Conception of Compositional Distributional Semantics |
| 15/12/2015 | Eng 207 | Martha Lewis, University of Oxford | A Compositional Explanation of the “Pet Fish” Phenomenon |
| 1/12/2015 | Eng 207 | Andreas Vlachos, University of Sheffield | Natural Language Understanding With Imitation Learning |
| 17/11/2015 | Eng 207 | Laura Rimell, University of Cambridge | Hypernym Detection with Topic Coherence and Image Generality |
| 3/11/2015 | Eng 207 | Tamara Polajnar, University of Cambridge | Tensor-based Compositional Distributional Semantics and Sparsity |
| 27/10/2015 | Eng 207 | Jochen Leidner, Thomson Reuters | Intelligent Information: R&D and Innovation in Information Access at Thomson Reuters |
Computational Linguistics lab activities are coordinated by Julian Hough.