明日ibisml等でアナウンスする予定ですが, Randomized Pruning, Phylogenic inference, Painless unsupervised learning, ...等で有名で, Dan KleinとMichael Jordanの学生 だった Alexandre Bouchard-Cote 氏が来週26日(火)に, 以下の内容で統数研でTalkしてくれることになりました。
自然言語データの変化の系統樹を復元する話です。 (多分, NIPS'08の これ 。)

国内でこういう話はほとんど誰もやっていないと思いますので, ご興味のある方はぜひお越しください。
7/26(火) 15:00〜17:00, 統数研セミナー室5 (統数研第4回統計的機械学習セミナー)
の予定です。

Title: Probabilistic Models of Language Change

Abstract:

I will talk about probabilistic models of language change, and how we
used these models to reconstruct proto-languages and to understand the
statistical regularities of the language change process itself.  I
will illustrate the potential of our methods with our results on the
so called functional load hypothesis.  This conjecture has eluded
classical models for decades, but here I will show how we obtained
compelling evidence for it by using our probabilistic models.

If time permits, I will also talk about new Sequential Monte Carlo
algorithms for the related problems of phylogenetic tree and cognate
inference.  The technique we used to construct these algorithms also
has applications in other NLP inference tasks over combinatorial
spaces, for example alignment and parsing.