Speaker:

Dr. Maunendra Desarkar

Head, Artificial Intelligence Department, IIT Hyderabad, India

Date: Monday, December 12, 2022, 6:30 PM (PT)

Virtual Event via Zoom and YouTube live

Video: https://ieeetv.ieee.org/video/democratizing-nlp

Synopsis:

In recent times, there is an enormous increase in the use of digital media as a channel for communication. This, combined with the fact that natural language is a ubiquitous mode of communication, has increased the volume of natural language data available for processing. Also, this has resulted in opportunities for extending NLP based services/solutions in multiple languages. Although existing algorithms for NLP tasks have been shown to achieve reasonable performances for the high-resource languages such as English, French etc. across tasks, the same is not true for many other languages widely spoken in the world. To ensure that the benefit of NLP research reaches a wider audience across different regions, it is important to pay special focus to the low-resource languages, or consider support for low-resource languages in an intelligent manner in the algorithm design phase. The talk will touch upon a few such considerations in this talk.

Speaker Biography:

Dr. Maunendra is an Associate Professor at the Computer Science and Engineering Department at IIT Hyderabad, India. Currently, he is also serving as the Head of the Department of the AI Department at IIT Hyderabad. He received his MTech degree in Computer Science in Engineering in 2006 from IIT Kanpur and PhD in 2014 from IIT Kharagpur. In the past, he has also worked for Sybase India Private Limited and Samsung Research Institute Bangalore. His research interests are in the areas of application of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence in the domains of Natural Language Processing, Information Retrieval, Recommendation Systems, etc. He has publications at reputed venues like ACL, NAACL, CIKM, ACM RecSys, ACM UMAP, IEEE ASONAM, IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems etc. He also serves as reviewer/program committee member for several conferences and journals like Neurocomputing, IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems, IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, Social Network Analysis and Mining etc. More details about his current research, publications etc. can be found at https://people.iith.ac.in/maunendra/.