Title: Introduction to Computational Semantics

Lecturer: Dr. Graham Katz (University of Osnabrück, Cognitive Science)

Course Description:

The field of natural language semantics concerns itself with the structure of the system by which people compute the meaning of utterances from their form. This enterprise has grown dramatically in the last twenty years, becoming a important sub-field of linguistics. While computational linguists have long been concerned with interpretation, the integration of results from linguistic semantics into a computational setting is a new and exciting field. This is Computational Semantics. Or, put another way, (paraphrasing Blackburn and Bos) computational semantics is the business of using a computer to compute meanings.

And using a computer to compute meaning is what we will do in this course, taking into consideration a wide range of empirical phenomena. In the first part of the course, we will introduce the basics of modern formal semantic theory, including function application, lambda abstraction, generalized quantification. In the second part of the course we will use the basic toolbox to expand the fragment of English for which we can do semantic interpretation. Here we will discuss a broader range of semantic phenomena from anaphoric binding to comparatives to tenses. The goal is to get beyond the architecture of the basic system to examine what happens when analyses are combined.

Titel: Einführung in die computationelle Semantik

Dozent: Dr. Graham Katz (University of Osnabrück, Cognitive Science)

Kursbeschreibung:

The field of natural language semantics concerns itself with the structure of the system by which people compute the meaning of utterances from their form. This enterprise has grown dramatically in the last twenty years, becoming a important sub-field of linguistics. While computational linguists have long been concerned with interpretation, the integration of results from linguistic semantics into a computational setting is a new and exciting field. This is Computational Semantics. Or, put another way, (paraphrasing Blackburn and Bos) computational semantics is the business of using a computer to compute meanings.

And using a computer to compute meaning is what we will do in this course, taking into consideration a wide range of empirical phenomena. In the first part of the course, we will introduce the basics of modern formal semantic theory, including function application, lambda abstraction, generalized quantification. In the second part of the course we will use the basic toolbox to expand the fragment of English for which we can do semantic interpretation. Here we will discuss a broader range of semantic phenomena from anaphoric binding to comparatives to tenses. The goal is to get beyond the architecture of the basic system to examine what happens when analyses are combined.