Objective "Natural language understanding is the ""holy grail"" of computational linguistics and a long-term goal in research on artificial intelligence. Understanding human communication is difficult due to the various ambiguities in natural languages and the wide range of contextual dependencies required to resolve them. Discovering the semantics behind language input is necessary for proper interpretation in interactive tools, which requires an abstraction from language-specific forms to language-independent meaning representations. With this project, I propose a line of research that will focus on the development of novel data-driven models that can learn such meaning representations from indirect supervision provided by human translations covering a substantial proportion of the linguistic diversity in the world. A guiding principle is cross-lingual grounding, the effect of resolving ambiguities through translation. The beauty of that idea is the use of naturally occurring data instead of artificially created resources and costly manual annotations. The framework is based on deep learning and neural machine translation and my hypothesis is that training on increasing amounts of linguistically diverse data improves the abstractions found by the model. Eventually, this will lead to universal sentence-level meaning representations and we will test our ideas with multilingual machine translation and tasks that require semantic reasoning and inference." Fields of science humanitieslanguages and literaturelinguisticsnatural sciencescomputer and information sciencesartificial intelligencemachine learningdeep learning Programme(s) H2020-EU.1.1. - EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme Topic(s) ERC-2017-COG - ERC Consolidator Grant Call for proposal ERC-2017-COG See other projects for this call Funding Scheme ERC-COG - Consolidator Grant Coordinator HELSINGIN YLIOPISTO Net EU contribution € 1 817 622,00 Address Yliopistonkatu 3 00014 Helsingin yliopisto Finland See on map Region Manner-Suomi Helsinki-Uusimaa Helsinki-Uusimaa Activity type Higher or Secondary Education Establishments Links Contact the organisation Opens in new window Website Opens in new window Participation in EU R&I programmes Opens in new window HORIZON collaboration network Opens in new window Other funding € 0,00 Beneficiaries (1) Sort alphabetically Sort by Net EU contribution Expand all Collapse all HELSINGIN YLIOPISTO Finland Net EU contribution € 1 817 622,00 Address Yliopistonkatu 3 00014 Helsingin yliopisto See on map Region Manner-Suomi Helsinki-Uusimaa Helsinki-Uusimaa Activity type Higher or Secondary Education Establishments Links Contact the organisation Opens in new window Website Opens in new window Participation in EU R&I programmes Opens in new window HORIZON collaboration network Opens in new window Other funding € 0,00
