Recent Developments in Computational Semantics
(SS 2010)

Seminar / Hauptseminar

Lecturer: Manfred Pinkal
Place: C7 2, Konferenzraum 2.11
Time: Mo, 10-12 (First meeting 19.04.2010)
Appropriate for: M.Sc. and advanced B.Sc. students

Overview

Due to the advance of data-intensive methods, semantics has continuously moved into the focus of computational linguistics research and language technology, in the last decade. In the seminar, we will look into central topics like

• Word-sense disambiguation and discrimination (Schütze 1998)
• Modeling semantic similarity (Weeds&Weir 2003)
• Shallow semantic parsing, role labeling (Palmer et al. 2005)
• Automatic acquisition of paraphrase and inference patterns (Lin&Pantel 2001)
• Automatic acquisition of structured meaning information (frames and scripts: Chambers&Jurafsky 2008)

We will pay special attention to most recent developments that aim at the integration of concepts of conventional logic-based semantics with data-intensive distributional approaches:

• Natural logic and textual inference (MacCartney&Manning 2007, MacCartney 2009)
• Compositional distributional semantics (Erk&Pado 2008)

Topics and references are meant to give a first orientation. The topic list will be extended and refined in the beginning of the seminar, dependent on the size of the group and special interests of the participants.

Formalities

Degree	Credit Points / Leistungspunkte
M.Sc.	4 (Talk only), 7 (Talk + Paper)
B.Sc.	7 (Talk + Paper) Hauptseminar

Deadline for exam registration: 02.07.2010
(this is a formal requirement only - but a necessary one - for students who do not write a term paper)
Deadline for submission of term paper: 01.10.2010

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