Schedule: seminar on word meaning in context

This schedule is subject to change.

Week 1

    • Jan 19 Introduction and course overview

Part 1: Phenomena

    • 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

Week 2

Week 3

    • Feb 2 The view from annotation projects: problems with sense annotation, and alternative meaning characterizations

    • Feb 4 Background: Concepts as prototypes or exemplars, and their connection to word meaning.

      • Reading: Greg Murphy, Big Book of Concepts, chapter 3 through page 60, available on Canvas.

      • If you are curious to hear why the "classical approach" was rejected, part of chapter 2 of the Big Book of Concepts is also on Canvas

Week 4

Week 5

    • Feb 16 Class canceled due to inclement weather

    • Feb 18 Class canceled due to inclement weather

Week 6

Part 2: Representations

    • Feb 23 Class canceled due to inclement weather

    • Feb 25 Generalized event knowledge

Week 7

Week 8

    • Mar 9 Asher's type-compositional semantics.

      • Reading: Nicholas Asher, Selectional restrictions, types and categories, Journal of Applied Logic 2014. Available on Canvas. We read pages 74-83, ending with the paragraph "So to conclude".

    • Due: Initial project descriptions, around 2 pages.

    • Mar 11 Zeevat et al: Representing the Lexicon. 2017, In: Bridging Formal and Conceptual Semantics. Selected papers of BRIDGE-14.

Week 9

Spring break

Week 10

Week 11

Week 12

Week 13

    • Apr 13 Background: Bayesian generative models in computational linguistics, in semantics and pragmatics (lecture)

      • No assigned reading, but if you would like to read more, check out section 2 of the "Probabilistic Trend in Semantics and Pragmatics" draft on Canvas

    • Apr 15 Situtation description systems (lecture)

      • No assigned reading, but this is based on Erk and Herbelot (draft): "How to marry a star: probabilistic constraints for meaning in context". I'll put a current draft on Canvas.

Week 14

Part 3: Challenges

    • Apr 20 Can the meaning of a word vary arbitrarily?

      • Reading: Recanati, Literal Meaning, chapter 9 -- available on Canvas. We'll focus on sections 9.1 through 9.3 and 9.7.

    • Apr 22 The immediacy of world knowledge

Week 15

Week 16

    • May 4: Discussion of course projects:

    • Gabriella Chronis, Venkat Govindarajan

    • May 6: Discussion of course projects

    • Ellen Jones, Yejin Cho, Samuel Cantor

Final project report due: Monday May 17, end of day