This schedule is subject to change.

• Jan 19  Introduction and course overview

• Jan 21 Tests for sense distinctions, and their problems.
• Please choose one of two readings:
  
• Cruse, Polysemy and related phenomena from a cognitive linguistic viewpoint -- available on Canvas
• Tuggy, Ambiguity, polysemy, and vagueness
  

Week 2

• Jan 26 Regular polysemy
• Reading: Johannes Dölling, Systematic polysemy. Warning: this is long, but it is fine to skim.
  
  
• Jan 28 The view from annotation projects: problems with sense annotation, and alternative meaning characterizations
• Please choose one of these readings:
• Passonneau et al, Word sense annotation of polysemous words by multiple annotators
• Kremer et al: What substitutes tell us -- analysis of an all-words lexical substitution corpus
• Erk et al, Investigations on word senses and word usages
  

• Feb 2 Background: Concepts as prototypes or exemplars, and their connection to word meaning
• Reading: A chapter from Murphy's Big Book of Concepts, to be made available on Canvas
  
  
• Feb 4 Background: Feature representations in psychology and neuroscience
  

• Feb 9  Distinct senses in the brain?
  
• Feb 11 Concept combination
  

• Feb 16 Generalized event knowledge
• Reading: McRae and Matsuki, People use their knowledge of common events to understand language, and do so as quickly as possible. Available on Canvas
  
  
• Feb 18 Compositionality and meaning in context
• Reading: Pelletier, Compositionality and Concepts- a perspective from formal semantics and philosophy of language, chapter 3 in Hampton/Winter, Compositionality and concepts in linguistics and psychology
  

Part 2: Representations                               

• Feb 23 Background: type theory.
  
• Feb 25 Asher's type-compositional semantics.

• Mar 2 Background: frames (in the Düsseldorf sense). Zeevat et al: Stochastic frames.
  
• Mar 4 Background: machine learning and classification.
  

• Mar 9 Larsson, and perception as classification.
• Mar 11 Lappin, Cooper, Larsson and Dobnik: combining perception as classification with type theory
  

Spring break

• Mar 23 Gärdenfors' conceptual spaces
  
• Mar 25 Background: distributional semantics a.k.a. semantic spaces a.k.a. word embeddings in computational linguistics
  

• Mar 30: Background: distributional semantics a.k.a. semantic spaces a.k.a. word embeddings in computational linguistics
• April 1: Semantic spaces in cognition: Kintsch
  

• Apr 6 Baroni and Sadrzadeh: Compositional distributional semantics
  
• Apr 8 Background: Bayesian generative models in computational linguistics
  
  
  

• Apr 13 Situation description systems
  
• Apr 15  Situtation description systems, continued
  

Part 3: Challenges                               

• Apr 20 Can the meaning of a word vary arbitrarily? Recanati, and Del Pinal
  
• Apr 22 The immediacy of world knowledge: Hagoort

• Apr 27 Conceptually and referentially afforded meanings
  
• Apr 29 Is it possible to get a universal feature set to describe word meanings?

• May 4: Discussion of course projects
• May 6: Discussion of course projects