BIDSA Seminar: "Some tough and strange problems in automatic summarisation"

"Some tough and strange problems in automatic summarisation"

11 February 2019, 12:30PM

Bocconi University, Room 3.b3.sr01

via Roentgen 1, 3rd floor

ABSTRACT: 

Automatic summarisation, extractive and abstractive, is a tough task both conceptually and computationally. The task has several important applications in social science research, and comprises a true test of the depth of language understanding by computers. In this talk I will survey some of the challenges in defining the automatic summarisation task, and how it corresponds to our data and our evaluation methods. In particular, I discuss some central caveats of summarisation, incurred in the use of the ROUGE metric for evaluation, with respect to optimal and/or human solutions. I also give some preliminary outlook for future definition of the problem, given these findings and consequential new horizons in system development.

SPEAKER: 

Natalie is Associate Professor in NLP and Data Science at the IT University (ITU), in Copenhagen, Denmark. At ITU she co-developed and now leads the first Data Science programme in Denmark, a BSc. Before coming to ITU, she held positions as Chief Analyst at MobilePay, Danske Bank, and Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Copenhagen and Malmö University.

Natalie holds a PhD in NLP from Dublin City University's School of Computing. She holds a further four degrees: an MSc in Mathematics from Trinity College, Dublin, a BSc in Mathematics and MA in Linguistics from the University of Montreal, and a BA in French and Spanish.

Natalie is a Canadian, living in Copenhagen for the past 10 years with her husband and two daughters.