Beyond Good-Turing

Attended the Alan Turing Centennial Conference at Bar-Ilan University.
100 years since Turing was born.

Corinna Cortes co-invented SVMs. Heads Google Research in New York.

"Beyond Good-Turing". Handling words you've never seen before. Classic NLP problem.

Text is messy. Uncertain. Not clean data.

Her solution: weighted automata. State machines where every transition has a probability attached. Words get weights. Path through the graph gives you the most likely interpretation.

Apparently this is how speech recognition works. Multiple possible interpretations. Find the best path.

Her closing question: "How do we learn from uncertain data?"

Good question. Don't have the answer. Neither does she yet, I think.