CSE891 Section 005: Computational Semantics and Discourse
Fall 2007
Time: Wednesday 4:00-5:30pm
Location: EB3112
This is a seminar course on Computational Semantics. Computational Semantics addresses how to automatically acquire semantic representations of natural language expressions. Some traditional topics of interest are: construction of meaning representations, semantic underspecification, quantifier scope resolution, anaphora resolution, and presupposition projection. Computational semantics has points of contact with the areas of lexical semantics (word sense disambiguation and role labelling), discourse semantics, formal semantics, knowledge representation and automated reasoning. Since 1999 there is an ACL (Association for Computational Linguistics) special interest group on computational semantics SIGSEM.
We will meet weekly to read and discuss chapters from the following books:
Book1: Representation and Inference for Natural Language: A First Course in Computational Semantics, by Patrick Blackburn and Johan Bos, CSLI.
Book 2: Working with Discourse Representation Theory: An Advanced Course in Computational Semantics, by Patrick Blackburn and Johan Bos
Schedule of the Course
| Class Date | Topic | Presenter |
| Sept 19 | Book 1: Chapter 1.1-1.2 (Introduction, model checking) | Matt |
| Sept 26 | Book 1: Chapter 1.3-1.4 ( Implementation in Prolog) | Tyler |
| Oct 3 | Book 1: Chapter 2 (Lambda Calculus) | Chen |
| Oct 10 | Book 1: Chapter 3.1 - 3.3 (Underspecified Representation) | Zhong |
| Oct 17 | Book 1: Chapter 3.4 (Hole Semantics) | Zahar |
| Oct 24 | Book 2: Chapter 1 (Discourse Representation Theroy) | Shaolin |
| Oct 31 | No meeting | |
| Nov. 7 | Book 2: Chapter 2 (Building Discourse Representation) | Matt |
| Nov. 14 | Book 2: Chapter 3 (Pronoun Resolution) | Tyler |
| Nov. 21 | Book 2: Chapter 4 (Presupposition Projection ) | Chen |
| Nov. 28 | Book 2: Chapter 5 (Acceptability Constraints) | Zhong |