This schedule is subject to change.

Assignments are due at the end of their due date (midnight).

Readings will be posted here. They are meant to accompany the class, and can be read before or after the class session.

Week 1

• Jan 14: Introduction: some semantics-related tasks (not easy ones)
  
  
• Jan 16: Language and propositional logic
  Material: a logic puzzle
  

Week 2

• Jan 21: Theorem proving, and working with the Natural Language Toolkit
  
  background reading, not necessary to do before class: NLTK book ch. 10: NLTK and semantics (up to and including section 10.2)
  material: logic puzzle in propositional logic (don't read before class), some very simple code showcasing Prover9 in NLTK, and code for running the logic puzzle
  
  
• Jan 23: Language and first-order logic
  material: some sentences to translate into first-order logic, and some more sentences to translate
  Syntax and semantics of first-order logic
  

Week 3

• Jan 28: university closed due to inclement weather
  
  
• Jan 30: First-order theorem proving
  
  More about unification (if you are curious; not required for the class): F. Baader and W. Snyder, Unification Theory. In J.A. Robinson and A. Voronkov, editors, Handbook of Automated Reasoning, volume I, pages 447–533. Elsevier Science Publishers, 2001.
  
  The automatic semantic analysis tool we use for the demo in class: http://svn.ask.it.usyd.edu.au/trac/candc/wiki/boxer
  This tool uses neo-Davidsonian semantics and DRT -- we discuss this in more detail later.
  
  

Week 4

• Feb 4: Introduction to compositional semantics
  Assignment 1 due.
  
  
• Feb 6: Typed lambda calculus
  Material: Lambda expression and type for transitive verbs.
  

Week 5

• Feb 11: Phenomena and how to represent them: Event semantics, and intensions.
• Resources that describe semantic role inventories: FrameNet, VerbNet (an extension of the Levin classes). Here is a recent effort to define a small, universal role set: LIRICS
  
  
• Feb 13: Quantifier scope ambiguity and dominance graphs.
• Saarbrucken slides on dominance graphs
• More on dominance graphs: Egg, Koller, and Niehren: The Constraint Language for Lambda Structures. Journal of Logic, Language, and Information, 10(4):457-485.

Week 6

• Feb 18: Phenomena that require higher-order expressions, and the reason why we need to avoid higher-order logic.
  
  
• Feb 20: First-order approximations, and Minimal Recursion Semantics
  We also discuss your project ideas.
• Readings: Jerry Hobbs: Ontological Promiscuity

Week 7

• Feb 25: Generalized quantifiers, and Minimal Recursion Semantics
  Assignment 2 due
  
•  Background readings: Minimal Recursion Semantics paper and demo
• Background on generalized quantifiers, if you want to know more: 
• Barwise and Cooper. Generalized quantifiers and natural language. Linguistics and Philosophy 4(2), 1981.
  
• Keenan, Some properties of natural language quantifiers: Generalized quantifier theory. Linguistics and Philosophy 25 (5), 2002. 
• If you are curious why "most" is not first order definable, see van Benthem and Doets: Higher Order Logic.
  
  
• Feb 27: Discourse processing
• Saarbrücken slides: Slideset 1, slideset 2, slideset 3
  

Week 8

• Mar 4: Semantic parsing and ontologies
• ACL 2010 tutorial on Semantic Parsing: Kate and Wong
• Wong and Mooney, NAACL 2006
• Kate and Mooney, ACL 2006
• Zettlemoyer and Collins, EMNLP 2007
  
  
• Mar 6: How not to use formal logic: Natural Logic
• MacCartney and Manning, IWCS 2009
• Djalali and Potts (slideset from a natural language workshop)
• Bar-Haim et al 2007: Semantic Inference at the Lexical-Syntactic Level.
• Lotan et al 2013: TruthTeller: Annotating predicate truth.
  
• Project proposal due
  

Week 9: Spring break

Week 10

• Mar 18: Distributional models
• Slides
  
• Mar 20: Practical issues in computing distributional models
  

Week 11

• Mar 25: Distributional inference rules
• Dekang Lin and Patrick Pantel. 2001. DIRT - Discovery of Inference Rules from Text. KDD-01.
• Timothy Chklovski and Patrick Pantel. 2004. VERBOCEAN: Mining the Web for Fine-Grained Semantic Verb Relations. EMNLP.
• Idan Szpektor and Ido Dagan, 2008. Learning Entailment Rules for Unary Templates. COLING. 
• Jonathan Berant, Ido Dagan, Jacob Goldberger. 2011. Global Learning of Typed Entailment Rules. ACL
  
• PPDB: The Paraphrase Database. Juri Ganitkevitch, Benjamin Van Durme, and Chris Callison-Burch. In NAACL-2013.
• Mar 27: Neural network-based models: Guest lecture by Stephen Roller
  
• Assignment 3 due

Week 12

• April 1: Semantic relations 
  Project progress report due
  Readings:
• Alessandro Lenci, Distributional semantics in linguistic and cognitive research (a general discussion of distributional models, their recent successes, shortcomings, and foundations)
• Marco Baroni and Alessandro Lenci, How we BLESSed distributional semantic evaluation (the BLESS corpus, and analysis of some distributional models)
• Julie Weeds and David Weir, A general framework for distributional similarity (distributional generality)
• Julie Weeds, David Weir, and Diana McCarthy, Characterising measures of lexical distributional similarity (distributional generality)
  
• Maayan Zhitomirsky-Geffet and Ido Dagan, Bootstrapping distributional feature vector quality (the Distributional Hypothesis)
  
• April 3: More semantic relations.
  Readings:
• Lili Kotlerman, Ido Dagan, Idan Szpektor, and Maayan Zhitomirsky-Geffet, Directional distributional similarity for lexical inference.
• Alessandro Lenci and Giulia Benotto, Identifying hypernyms in distributional semantic spaces.
  

Week 13

• April 8: Multimodal models. Describing word meaning in context
  
  
• April 10: Compositional distributional semantics
  

Week 14

• April 15: Putting things together: logic-based plus distributional semantics
  Assignment 4 due
  
  
• April 17: Probabilistic inference
  

Week 15

• April 22: Grounded models: Guest lecture, Ray Mooney
  
• April 24: Distributional semantics: Is it semantics?
  

Week 16

• April 29: Project presentations
• 2:00 Michael Teng
• 2:15 Tomas McCandless
• 2:30 Jason Mielens
• 2:45 Grant DeLozier
  
• May 1:   Project presentations
• 2:00 Alex Rosenfeld
• 2:15 Emily Tagtow
• 2:30 Jacqueline Larsen
• 2:45 Julian Michael
• 3:00 Simon Hafner

• May 8: final report due (end of the day)