Explicit world-knowledge and distributional semantic representations (ESSLI, July 2017)

Description

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 cooccurrences 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.

(This course was prepared in collaboration with Asad Sayeed, but was eventually taught by him as I was on maternity leave.)

European Summer School of Logic, Language, and Information (ESSLLI 2017, Toulouse, France) - Language and Computation (Advanced)

Schedule

• Monday, 17. July 2017: Foundations of representation
• Tuesday, 18. July 2017: World-knowledge in the lexicon
• Wednesday, 19. July 2017: Distributional semantics
• Thursday, 20. July 2017: Representational conflicts in models of the lexicon
• Friday, 21. July 2017: Modeling the distinctions