Explicit world-knowledge and distributional semantic representations
Advanced course (Language and Computation) at ESSLLI 2017 Asad Sayeed and Alessandra Zarcone
This is an interdisciplinary course intended to bring together students from psycholinguistic and computational backgrounds and explore the question of world-knowledge in distributional semantics through lectures on recent published research. Distributional semantics exploits co-occurrences in corpus data in order to represent semantic knowledge implicitly through statistics about word context, but the extent to which this can serve as a proxy for semantic grounding in some form of world-knowledge is still an unresolved question. What we currently understand and how to think about the boundary between distributionally-represented knowledge and explicit world-knowledge will be the main topic of the course.
Slides
- 1: Foundations of representation
- 2: World-knowledge in the lexicon
- 3: Distributional semantics
- 4: Representational conflicts in models of the lexicon
- 5: Modeling the distinctions
References / Syllabus
- Baroni, M., & Lenci, A. (2010). Distributional memory: A general framework for corpus-based semantics. Computational Linguistics, 36(4), 673-721.
- Demberg, V., Kiagia, E., & Sayeed, A. (2013). The Index of Cognitive Activity as a Measure of Linguistic Processing. In Proceedings of the 35th annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2013, Berlin). Austin TX: Cognitive Science Society.
- Elman, J. L. (2011). Lexical knowledge without a lexicon?. The Mental Lexicon, 6(1), 1-33.
- Ferretti, T. R., McRae, K., & Hatherell, A. (2001). Integrating verbs, situation schemas, and thematic role concepts. Journal of Memory and Language, 44(4), 516-547.
- Fodor, J. A., & Lepore, E. (1998). The emptiness of the lexicon: reflections on James Pustejovsky's The Generative Lexicon. Linguistic Inquiry, 29(2), 269-288.
- Geeraerts, D. (2002). The theoretical and descriptive development of lexical semantics. The lexicon in focus. Competition and convergence in current lexicology, 23-42.
- Hobbs, J. R., & del Rey, M. (2011). Word meaning and world knowledge. In Maienborn, C. et al. Semantics: An international handbook of natural language meaning, 1, 740-761.
- Jackendoff, R. (2002). Foundations of language: Brain, meaning, grammar, evolution. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK.
- Lenci, A. (2011). Composing and updating verb argument expectations: A distributional semantic model. In Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics (pp. 58-66). Association for Computational Linguistics.
- McRae, K., & Matsuki, K. (2009). People use their knowledge of common events to understand language, and do so as quickly as possible. Language and linguistics compass, 3(6), 1417-1429.
- Pustejovsky, J. (1995). The Generative Lexicon. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
- Pustejovsky, J. (2013). Dynamic event structure and habitat theory. In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Generative Approaches to the Lexicon (GL2013) (pp. 1-10).
- Zarcone, A., Padó, S., & Lenci, A. (2014). Logical Metonymy Resolution in a Words-as-Cues Framework: Evidence From Self-Paced Reading and Probe Recognition. Cognitive science, 38(5), 973-996.