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Lecturer: Raquel Fernández (ILLC, University of Amsterdam)
Timetable: Tuesdays 13-15h in G3.13 and Wednesdays 15-17h in A1.06 (both rooms at Science Park 904).
Prerequisites: There are no formal prerequisites, but I'll assume some basic knowledge of semantics/pragmatics of natural language. Programming skills are not required, although they are useful.

Overview: Semantics and pragmatics are concerned with the study of natural language meaning and its context of use in written texts and in conversation. The computational counterparts of these disciplines address these issues from an explicitely empirical and computational point of view, combining insights from linguistic theory, computational linguistics, and artificial intelligence. The course will introduce some of the fundamental concepts in contemporary computational semantics and pragmatics, exposing students to current research in topics such as distributional lexical semantics, generation and resolution of referring expressions, speech acts, and dialogue modelling.

Evaluation: The course will consist of lectures and discussions of research papers; everybody is expected to play an active role in class. Students will be asked to write a short paper by the end of the course (the last couple of weeks will be dedicated to this). The final paper will account for 70% of the overall grade. The remaining 30% will correspond to exercises, and presentations and discussions of readings.

This website (especially the stuff below) will be updated throughout the course. Please check it regularly. Its contents are subject to change.

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Week 1

Main topic: Lexical Semantics

• 3 Sept: Course overview [slides]. Introduction to lexical semantics [slides].
  To do: Read the paper by Lapata below and find out what WordNet is and how it is organised.
  I recommend you to install Python and NLTK (see nltk.org for instructions) and go over the section on WordNet (section 2.5 in chapter two) of the NLTK book. If you don't know any Python, start from the beginning of the book; the book does not assume you know any programming language.


• 4 Sept: Discussion of the following paper:
  • 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).
  More on lexical semantics: WordNet; theories of concepts and typicality effects [slides].
  To do: Read the overview papers on DSMs. Go over section 2.5 of the NLTK book.

Week 2

Main topic: Distributional Semantic Models

• 10 Sept: Introduction to DSMs [slides].
  Background readings and resources:
  • A. 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.
  • The Word Space Wiki, Web Infomap
  To do: Have a look at the paper by Abramova et al. and at homework #1 (both are below).


• 11 Sept: More on DSMs [slides].
  Brief discussion of the following paper exemplifying use of DSMs and WordNet:
  • Katja Abramova, Raquel Fernández, and Federico Sangati (2013) Automatic Labeling of Phonesthemic Senses. In Proceedings of the 35th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, pp. 1696-1701. Berlin, Germany.
  To do: Read the seminal paper on the generation of referring expressions by Dale & Reiter (1995).

Homework #1: due on Friday 20 Sept. Submit via email a PDF and code file named "yourname_hw1".
[suplementary material: python code impleming a basic DSM and code documentation]

Week 3

Main topic: Referring Expressions (generation)

• 17 Sept: Introduction to the generation of referring expressions [slides]
  Readings and resources:
  • 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.
  • The TUNA and D-TUNA corpora


• 18 Sept: More on GRE [slides]
  

Week 4

Main topic: Referring in Dialogue

• 24 Sept: Introduction to referring in interactive settings [slides]
  Background readings:
  • Clark & Wilkes-Gibbs (1986) Referring as a collaborative process, Cognition, 22:1-39.
  • Brenna & Clark (1996) Conceptual pacts and lexical choice in conversation, Journal of Experimental Psychology, 22:1482-1493.
  We'll start the lecture by discussing the approach taken in this short paper (you are welcome to have a look at it if you wish):
  • Baumgaertner, Fernández, & Stone (2012) Towards a Flexible Semantics: Colour Terms in Collaborative Reference Tasks, Proc. First Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM), Montreal, Canada.
  To do: Read the paper by Jordan & Walker (2005)


• 25 Sept: More on referring in interactive settings [slides]
  Discussion of the following paper:
  • Jordan & Walker (2005) Learning Content Selection Rules for Generating Object Descriptions in Dialogue, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 24:157-194.

Homework #2: due on Tuesday 1 Oct by 13:00 (before class).
[suplementary material: TUNA Corpus data sample]

Week 5

Main topic: Dialogue Modelling

• Background readings:
  • Brennan, Galati, & Kuhlen (2010) Two minds, one dialog: Coordinating speaking and understanding. In Psychology of Learning and Motivation, vol. 53.
  • Schlangen (2005) Modelling dialogue: Challenges and approaches. Künstliche Intelligenz, 3:23-28.
  • Fernández. Dialogue. Draft of a chapter to appear in R. Mitkov (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics, 2nd edition, Oxford University Press.
• 1 Oct: Intro to dialogue: speech act theory vs. joint action model and interactive alignment model [slides]
• 2 Oct: More on dialogue: dialogue acts and dialogue coherence, plus turn taking [slides]

Homework #3: due on Friday 11 Oct by 14:00.
[suplementary material: Switchboard Corpus]

To do: Choose a topic for your final project/paper related to the subjects covered in the course.
Send me an email about your proposed topic as soon as possible but no later than Monday 7 Oct 13:00. If you want to meet up with me, I'll be available that Monday between 16:00 and 18:00 (send me an email before Monday to make an appointment).

Week 6

Presentations of plans for project/final paper. Attendance to all presentations is mandatory.
5-minute presentations with up to 10 minutes for discussion (with flexibility in this case).

• 8 Oct: Julian, Lydia/Agnes, Sarah, Henning/Dominik
• 9 Oct: Remi, Suzanne, Robert

Week 7

Individual supervision meetings to discuss ongoing project work (in my office at the ILLC, room F1.07 in SP 107; entrance through Nikhef at SP 105).

Bring the current draft of your final paper to the meeting.

Tuesday 15 Oct 15:30-16:00: Remi 16:00-16:30: Robert 16:30-17:00: Dominik & Henning

Wednesday 16 Oct 14:00-14:30: Suzanne 14:30-15:00: Sarah 15:30-16:00: Julian 16:00-16:30: Agnes & Lydia

Week 8

• Thursday 24 Oct, room A1.06: final presentations of projects. Attendance to all presentations is mandatory.
• 10:30-10:50: Robert
• 10:50-11:10: Sarah
• 11:10-11:20: break
• 11:20-11:40: Julian
• 11:40-12:00: Suzanne
• 12:00-12:40: lunch break
• 12:40-13:00: Remi
• 13:00-13:25: Agnes & Lydia
• 13:25-13:35: break
• 13:35-14:00: Dominik & Henning
• Sunday 27 Oct: final paper due

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Guidelines for Final Projects

Final presentation

• Timeframe: up to 15 minutes for individual projects and up to 20 minutes for non-individual projects. In either case, there will be 5 extra minutes for questions. Only very brief clarification questions are possible during the talk.
• Evaluation: I will grade your presentation according to these criteria. The presentation is worth 10% of your final grade.

Final paper [ due on Sunday 27 Oct midnight ]

• Format: your final paper should be formatted using the Latex style files of EACL 2014, which you can download from here (scroll down to "Submission Format").
• Length: between 5 and 8 pages, including references.
• Structure: your paper should include a short abstract, an Introduction section, a Related Work section, some sections where you present your analyses and results, and a Conclusions section. Survey papers will have a slightly different structure, but they should definitely include an abstract as well as Introduction and Conclusions sections.
• Evaluation: I will evaluate your paper in a similar fashion as reviewers evaluate papers that are submitted to a conference. Have a look at the review forms for ACL 2010 (the relevant ones are those tagged as "long"). The most relvant criteria for the purpose of the course are: CLARITY (including layout, style, orthographic and grammatical correctness), CORRECTNESS (of the analysis and the methodology), MEANINGFUL COMPARISON, SUBSTANCE, and REPLICABILITY. See the review forms for further details.

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