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Semantics and pragmatics are concerned with the study of natural language meaning and its context of use. The computational counterparts of these disciplines address these issues from an explicitly empirical and computational point of view, combining insights from linguistic theory, psycholinguistics, computational linguistics, and artificial intelligence. The overall objective of the course is to give a broad overview of the major topics and methodologies in computational semantics and pragmatics, exposing students to classic seminal work and current research in the field.

• Lecturer: Raquel Fernández (ILLC, University of Amsterdam)
• Timetable: Block 2, Wednesdays and Fridays 11-13h. Room G3.13, Science Park 904.
• Prerequisites: There aren't any strong prerequisites, but I'll assume some basic knowledge of semantics or pragmatics of natural language. Programming skills may be useful but are not required. Please fill in this intake questionnaire if you intend to follow the course.
• Evaluation: The grade for the course will be based on regular homework exercises and participation in class.
• Possible projects: I'm willing to discuss the possibility of supervising small research projects as a follow up to the course.

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Week 1

• 31 Oct: Overview of the course [slides] [CLS slides by Phong Le]
• 02 Nov: Guest lecture by Jan van Eijck: Introduction to Haskell [slides] [Haskell code]
• Assignments:
  • Homework #1a (report of seminar talk), due on Wed 7 Nov, 10am. Send me a PDF by email.
  • Homework #1b (Haskell exercises), due on Monday 12 Nov, 10am. Submit by email.
• Readings: Next week we will cover material from chapters 6, 7, and possibly parts of chapter 9 of the book Computational Semantics with Functional Programming.

Week 2

• 07 Nov: First-order logic for natural language semantics in Haskell
  [slides by Jan van Eijck and Christina Unger; for reference only - note that the code is different from that in CSFP]
  [code: FSynF.hs, MCWPL.hs, Model.hs]
• 09 Nov: Guest lecture by Jan van Eijck: Haskell implementation of a Montague-style fragment (sort of)
• Assignment:
  • Homework #2 (compositional semantics with Haskell), due on Monday 19 Nov, 10am. Submission via Blackboard (more details on Wednesday in class).
  • code: COSPhw2_FOL.hs and COSPhw2_NL.hs
  You are encouraged to do this assignment in pairs, where someone with programming experience teams up with someone with little programming experience. Submit one set of answers per pair.

Week 3

• 14 Nov: Final session on computational formal semantics [slides]
• 16 Nov: We started to look into lexical semantics [slides]
• Assignment: read and prepare for discussion on Wednesday 21 the following two papers (it's a good idea to take notes while working on the papers, but there is no need to submit any report by Wednesday - be ready to discuss in class):
  • Lapata (2001) A Corpus-based Account of Regular Polysemy: The Case of Context-sensitive Adjectives, in Proceedings of the Conference of the North American chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL).
  • Utt & Padó (2011) Ontology-based Distinction between Polysemy and Homonymy, in Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Computational Semantics.

Week 4

• 21 Nov: Discussion of Lapata (2001) [note takers: Jetze and Ciyang] and Utt & Padó (2011) [note takers: Sanne and Philip].
  • Discussion summaries will be available on Blackboard in the blog "Papers for Discussion"
• 23 Nov: Word sense disambiguation [slides]
• Assignments:
  • Homework #3, due on Monday 26 Nov, 10am. Submission via Blackboard.
  • Alternative option for HW#3: do one of the exercises in Homework #3 plus exercises 3 from chapter 6 of the NLTK book. For those who choose this option, the homework is due on Wednesday 28, 10am. Submit via Blackboard (one PDF file and one Python file with comments).
• Readings: choose one of the following papers:
  • Adam Kilgarriff (1997) I don't believe in word senses, Computers and the Humanities, 31:91-113.
  • Patrick Hanks (2000) Do Word Meanings Exist?, Computers and the Humanities, 34:205-215.

Week 5

• 28 Nov: Psychological theories of concepts and unsupervised WSD [slides]
• 30 Nov: Distributional semantic models [slides]
  Background readings:
  • Alessandro Lenci (2008) Distributional Semantics in Linguistic and Cognitive Research, Italian Journal of Linguistics, 20(1):1-30.
  • P. Turney and P. Pantel (2010) From Frequency to Meaning: Vector Space Models of Semantics, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 37:141-188.
• Assignment: read a recent paper on distributional semantic models and prepare a presentation. This assignment can be done in pairs.
  • Read this carefully: Instructions and grading of paper presentations
  • You may want to have a look at these general tips on how to give a talk by Ulle Endriss.

Week 6

• 5 Dec: Introduction to DSMs continued [slides], plus two paper presentations
  • [Isabel slides] Erk & Pado (2010) Exemplar-Based Models for Word Meaning In Context, ACL.
  • [Phong slides] Grefenstette & Sadrzadeh (2011) Experimental support for a categorical compositional Distributional model of meaning, EMNLP.
• 7 Dec: More on Compositionality with DSMs
  • [Sanne slides] Guevara (2010) A Regression Model of Adjective-Noun Compositionality in Distributional Semantics, GEMS Workshop.
  • [Swantje/Nadine slides] Baroni & Zamparelli (2010) Nouns are vectors, adjectives are matrices: Representing adjective-noun constructions in semantic space, EMNLP.
  • [Philip slides] Socher, Huval, Manning, & Ng (2012) Semantic Compositionality Through Recursive Matrix-Vector Spaces, EMNLP.

Week 7

• 12 Dec: DSMs and word senses
  • [Cecilia slides] Erk and McCarthy (2009) Graded word sense assignment, EMNLP.
  • [Max slides] Boleda, Pado & Utt (2012) Regular polysemy: a distributional model, *SEM.
  • [Ciyang slides] Huang, Socher, Manning & Ng (2012) Improving Word Representations via Global Context and Multiple Word Prototypes, ACL.
• 14 Dec: Multi-modal DSMs
  • [Jonathan slides] Bruni, Tran & Baroni (2011) Distributional semantics from text and images, GEMS Workshop.
  • [Jetze slides] Bruni, Boleda, Baroni, & Tran (2012) Distributional semantics in technicolor, *SEM.
  • Course recap [slides]
• Assignment:
  • Homework #4 on distributional semantics, due on Friday 21 Dec, 5pm. Submission via Blackboard.
  • Code: dsm_basic.py

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Tentative list of topics

Here is a tentative list of topics for the course. Under each topic, you will find some representative references. Note that this is only to give you an idea of what each topic is about. As the course progresses, you'll be given a more precise list of required and recommended readings for each theme.

• Montague-style compositional semantics with functional programming
  • Fridays 2 and 9 October: guest lectures by Jan van Eijck.
    Jan van Eijck and Christina Unger, Computational Semantics with Functional Programming, Cambridge University Press.
• Textual entailment
  • Textual Entailment Portal, Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
  • I. Androutsopoulos and P. Malakasiotis (2010) A Survey of Paraphrasing and Textual Entailment Methods. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 38:135-187.
• Lexical semantics
  • Psycholinguistic approaches to word meaning
    Gregory Murphy (2002), The Big Book of Concepts, MIT Press.
  • Computational representation and disambiguation of word senses
    Roberto Navigli (2009) Word Sense Disambiguation: A Survey, ACM Computing Surveys, 41(2):1-69.
  • Distributional semantic models
    The Word Space Wiki
    Alessandro Lenci (2008) Distributional Semantics in Linguistic and Cognitive Research, Italian Journal of Linguistics, 20(1):1-30.
    P. Turney and P. Pantel (2010) From Frequency to Meaning: Vector Space Models of Semantics, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 37:141-188.
• Pragmatic inference and abductive reasoning
  • Paul H. Grice (1975) Logic and Conversation
  • Jerry R. Hobbs et al. (1993) Interpretation as Abduction, Artificial Intelligence, 63, pp. 69-142.
• Speech acts and dialogue modelling
  • John Austin (1962) How to do things with words, Oxford University Press.
  • David Lewis (1979) Scorekeeping in a language game, Journal of Philosophical Logic, 8:339-359.
  • Harry Bunt (2000) Dialogue pragmatics and context specification, in Abduction, Belief and Context in Dialogue, pp. 81-150, John Benjamins.
  • Dan Jurafsky (2004) Pragmatics and Computational Linguistics. Handbook of Pragmatics, Oxford: Blackwell.
• Generation of referring expressions
  • Dale & Reiter (1995) Computational Interpretations of Gricean Maxims in the Generation of Referring Expressions, Cognitive Science, 18:233-266.
  • Krahmer & van Deemter (2012) Computational Generation of Referring Expressions: A Survey, Computational Linguistics 38(1):173-218.

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