Noah Smith has not yet arrived in Seattle as a member of the UW CSE faculty, but we’ll over-reach and claim partial credit for his “Best Paper” Award at the 2015 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics – Human Language Technologies (NAACL HLT 2015).
The paper – Retrofitting Word Vectors to Semantic Lexicons – describes “retrofitting,” a new way to improve any vector encodings of words in English (or any language) using existing semantic lexicons that link words with similar or related meanings.
Noah’s co-authors include UW CSE undergrad alum (and CMU Ph.D. student and soon-to-be UW CSE visiting Ph.D. student) Jesse Dodge, and CMU co-authors Manaal Faruqui, Sujay Kumar Jauhar, Chris Dyer, and Eduard Hovy.