Language and Logic
LANGUAGE PROCESSING AND COGNITION
Introductory course

MATTHEW CROCKER and MASSIMO POESIO

Centre for Cognitive Science, University of Edinburgh
Both weeks
mwc@cogsci.ed.ac.uk and poesio@cogsci.ed.ac.uk
Course description

This course presents computational models of language processing which are motivated and informed by current linguistic and psychological research. The course emphasises the mechanisms for ambiguity resolution and interpretation, focussing on incremental processing and underspecified representations, and also considers the acquisition of linguistic knowledge and strategies. The course begins with a review of empirical aspects of human language processing, and implications for the architecture and mechanisms of the language processor. We then consider the following material:

Syntactic Processing

  • - incremental processing and ambiguity resolution
  • - underspecification in syntax and parsing
  • - reanalysis
  • - statistical and competitive mechanisms

The Lexicon

  • - interface between syntactic and lexical processing
  • - lexical category and word sense disambiguation
  • - knowledge representation
  • - the lexicon in compositional semantics, underspecified
  • semantic interpretation
  • - lexical semantics

Contextual Processing

  • - psycholinguistic evidence on anaphoric processing
  • - centering theory
  • - computational models of ellipsis resolution
  • - corpus-based methods for resolving pronouns and definite descriptions
Prerequisites
None
Literature
No specific recommendation

 

 

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