Courses' slots:

Week two 9:00 - 10:30

Language and Logic introductory course:
Topics in the Semantics of Interrogative Clauses.

Teachers
  • Benjamin Spector ()
  • Márta Abrusán ()
Abstract:

The purpose of the class is to present in a systematic way some of the most influential lines of investigations pertaining to the semantics of questions. We will start by presenting two related types of theories, namely theories based on "sets of answers" (Hamblin 1973, Karttunen 1977), on the one hand, and theories based on "partition semantics", on the other hand (Gronendijk & Stockhof 1982, 1984), and discuss their strengths and weaknesses. This will lead us to an extensive discussion of embedded interrogatives (including topics such as weak and strong exhaustivity in relation to NPI licensing, the distinction between de dicto and de re readings, extensional vs. intensional question embedding predicates, quantificational variability). We will provide a compositional account of the meaning of wh-questions, which will allow us to address more specific topics such as identity questions, functional and pair-list readings of wh-questions, alternative questions.

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Language and Computation advanced course:
Psycho-computational issues in Morphology Learning and Processing.

Teacher
  • Vito Pirrelli ()
Abstract:

By providing a comprehensive overview of current machine-learning, psycholinguistic and theoretical linguistic literature on the topic, the course is intended to answer the following questions. How are words singled out of their embedding input stream? How are they processed and eventually understood in working memory? Are morphologically complex words stored in long-term memory as a whole or are they rather composed "on-line" in working memory from sub-lexical constituents? Do formal regularity and morpho-semantic transparency play any role in this? Does word-level knowledge require parallel development of form and meaning representations, or do the latter develop independently at a different pace to interact only at later stages? To what extent does past knowledge affect on-line word processing? What principles govern this knowledge? Are they morphology-specific or are they rather based on brain memory structures generically devoted to the ordered activation of items in time? Do they capture local, syntagmatic relations among sub-lexical co-occurring constituents, or also enforce more global paradigmatic constraints over classes of such constituents in complementary distribution?

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Language and Logic foundational course:
Meaning Composition: Empricial Problems and Formal Solutions.

Teacher
  • Louise McNally ()
Abstract:

This course provides an overview two of the main empirical problems that have emerged in the development of models for meaning composition in natural language, the tradeoffs that are involved in solving these problems, and some of the different techniques that have been proposed as solutions. The goal is twofold: to make students with logic backgrounds aware of the reasons why the composition of natural language meanings is not a trivial problem (even though at some levels it might seem that way), and to familiarize students with linguistics backgrounds with some of the main alternative techniques for meaning composition, their similarities and differences, and their pros and cons. The course will presuppose only a minimal familiarity with basic grammatical concepts and predicate logic.

An elegant theory of meaning composition for natural language might be expected to meet the following desiderata, among others:

-It should respect independently-motivated results of research on morphology, syntax, and the lexicon.

- It should be grounded in an independently motivated theory of what lexical meanings are like. - It should avoid idiosyncratic composition rules to the extent possible.

- It should be expressible in a sound and computationally tractable logic.

However, natural language data sometimes make a maximally elegant theory difficult. Perhaps the best-studied problem for the meaning composition in this respect has been quantification. In this course, we will focus on two additional problems which have driven various kinds of alternative meaning composition strategies: bare nominals and incorporation on the one hand, and so-called "intersective" vs. "nonintersective" modification, on the other. We will develop a sense of the general nature of the problems these phenomena pose, as well as a global vision of the issues the proposed solutions raise.

The plan for the course is the following:

Day 1: The basics: Classic "rule-to-rule" vs. "shake-and-bake" approaches to composition. [Discussion of work by Bach, Carpenter, Dowty, Klein & Sag, Montague, and others]

Days 2-3: The empirical problem: Bare nominals and incorporation. The solutions: type shifting, the separation of syntactic and semantic saturation, Discourse Representation Theory-based alternatives. [Discussion of work by Chung & Ladusaw, Dayal, de Hoop, Espinal & McNally, Farkas & de Swart, Kamp, Partee, Van Geenhoven, and others]

Days 4-5: The empirical problem: Intersective vs. nonintersective modification. The solutions: type coercion, enriched lexical representations, ad-hoc composition rules. [Discussion of work by Asher, Larson, McNally, Montague, Pustejovsky, and others]

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Language and Computation introductory course:
Standard XML query languages for natural language processing.

Teacher
  • Ulrich Schäfer ()

Course material: u_schaefer_xml_query.pdf

Abstract:

This course will introduce three standard XML query languages that have been designed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), XPath, XSLT and XQuery. Although various query languages have been proposed and developed for accessing annotated corpora, they are often tailored to specific formats and phenomena. This course will focus on the standard query languages for which multiple and very efficient implementations exist that run on almost any platform. Applications and examples are presented not only for corpus access, but also other NLP-related tasks such as accessing RDF ontologies and integrating NLP component output. Finally, the course will also briefly show the frameworks that are used to embed the query languages in popular programming languages.

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Logic and Computation advanced course:
Ontologies: Structuring, Modularity, and Heterogeneity.

Teachers
  • Stefano Borgo ()
  • Oliver Kutz ()

External page

Abstract:

The design of formal ontologies is an interdisciplinary area of research that draws on logic, philosophy, cognitive science, linguistics, as well as computer science, with major applications in the Semantic Web. As the scope and relevance of ontologies grows, both for supporting Semantic Web applications and for knowledge-rich processing in general, the issue of re-using/importing developed ontological components takes on an ever more critical role. The current solutions being pursued within OWL-oriented Semantic Web approaches have some severe limitations in this respect. For the next generation of ontology-based systems, it will be essential to move beyond this.

To achieve this, we present major methodologies and techniques to correctly construct, modify, and relate ontologies - understood in a broad sense as logical theories formulated in various formal languages - with an emphasis on heterogeneity, structuring and modularity, as well as foundations of ontology design. As illustrative examples, we will discuss prominent ontologies from the spatial, philosophical and linguistic domains. These will be analysed and structured using the Common Algebraic Specification Language (CASL), and shown 'at work' employing the tool HeTS, offering (heterogeneous) reasoning support for structured ontologies and providing powerful new mechanisms for reusing ontological components or modules. A Live-CD for hands-on experimentation with HeTS will be distributed to all participants.

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Logic and Computation foundational course:
Logics of Rational Agency.

Teacher
  • Eric Pacuit ()

Course material: lori-notes.pdf

Abstract:

Thinking about rational agents interacting over time is at the center of many research communities represented at ESSLLI. This course will introduce the main research themes and conceptual issues surrounding rational agency. The primary objective is to understand the complex phenomena that arise when rational agents interact and how to incorporate these phenomena into formal models. Studying rational agents involves many different aspects including (but not limited to) action, knowledge, belief, desires, and revision. This course covers all these ingredients toward the goal of understanding how these things work together. Specific topics that will be introduced during the course include 1. logics of knowledge and belief, 2. information dynamics and belief revision, 3. logics of preference and preference change, 4. logics of motivational mental attitudes, and 5. logics of individual and collective action and 6. group phenomena and issues of social choice. In fact, not all parts of this story have been developed within one single discipline. The course will also bring together several research programs: from philosophy, computer science, logic, and game theory, and try to see their various contributions in one coherent manner.

http://ai.stanford.edu/~epacuit/classes/esslli/log-ratagency.html

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Week two 11:00 - 12:30

Logic and Computation advanced course:
Logics with Counting.

Teacher

Course material: pratt-hartmann.pdf

Abstract:

This course presents a survey of decidable fragments of first-order logic with counting quantifiers. Such fragments include: (i) the numerical syllogistic, (ii) the 1-variable fragment with counting, (iii) graded modal logic, (iv) the guarded two-variable fragment with counting and (v) the two-variable fragment with counting. Such logics present special difficulties for the student of computational logic, because their complexity-theoretic analysis often requires specialized techniques. This course will give a comprehensive treatment of these techniques, culminating in a proof that the satisfiability and finite satisfiability problems for the two-variable fragment with counting quantifiers are both NEXPTIME-complete.

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Language and Logic introductory course:
Event Semantics and Adverbial Modification.

Teachers
  • Berit Gehrke ()
  • Boban Arsenijevic ()

External page

Abstract:

The course gives a general overview of (Neo-)Davidsonian event semantics and its motivation from adverbial modification. It furthermore introduces the notion of event structure, both from a conceptual and a model-theoretic point of view. An important issue concerns how far event structure, aspectual structure and argument structure are mutually related and whether it is possible or even preferable to reduce them to one. To identify elements of the event structure, argument structure and/or aspectual structure, we focus on the (un-)availability of various adverbial modifiers, in particular manner, temporal, aspectual and spatial ones, as well as the relation of such modifiers to the overall structure, e.g. the issue of high (event-external) vs. low (event-internal) adverbs. The presentation of the cross-linguistic diversity in the marking of voice and argument and adjunct roles, and phenomena like serial verb constructions, lead to a general discussion of the nat ure of the verbal category.

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Language and Logic advanced course:
Proof-Theoretic Semantics.

Teacher

Course material: proof_theoretic_semantics.html

Abstract:

Proof-Theoretic Semantics (PTS) is an alternative to model-theoretic (or truth-condition) semantics. It is based on the idea that the central notion in terms of which meanings are assigned to expressions is that of proof rather than truth. In this sense PTS is inferential rather than denotational in spirit. Although the claim that meaning is use has been quite prominent in philosophy for more than half a century, the model-theoretic approach has always dominated formal semantics. However, within general proof theory several formal approaches to PTS have been developed which promise to provide an alternative to the model-theoretic approach. After recalling certain basics from proof theory of natural deduction, this tutorial presents traditional approaches to PTS in the spirit of Dummett, Prawitz and Martin-Löf as well as advanced conceptions based on "definitional reasoning" based on work of the author.

http://www-ls.informatik.uni-tuebingen.de/esslli/

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Language and Computation foundational course:
Case, Scrambling and Default Word Order.

Teachers
  • Miriam Butt ()
  • Heike Zinsmeister ()

Course material: 01-CaseScramblingWordOrder_reader.pdf 02-Mueller1999.pdf 03-Mueller2002.pdf 04-BresnanEtAL2007.pdf 05-Evert2006.pdf 06-LuedelingEvertBaroni2007.pdf 07-Meurers2005.pdf 08-BaderHaeussler.pdf 09-CahillForstRohrer2007.pdf 10-FilippovaStrube2007.pdf 11-Forst2007.pdf 12-Keller2000.pdf 13-PatilEtAl2008.pdf 14-SchulteImWalde2002.pdf

Abstract:

Many of the world's languages are so-called "free word order" languages, whereby the major arguments of a clause can be scrambled quite freely. This scrambling generally goes hand-in-hand with a robust case marking system and some means of verb-argument agreement (usually verb-subject agreement, but not always), which allows the identification of the various arguments of the clause (i.e., which is the agent, the patient, the goal, etc.). Sometimes, however, the correct identification of which syntactic argument encodes which of the semantic participants of a verb/clause can only be achieved by world or contextual knowledge. Additionally, effects of so-called word order freezing can be observed, whereby suddenly the word order is not free, but is fixed if one wants a certain mapping of semantic participants to syntactic arguments. Finally, one generally also refers to a "default word order" exhibited by languages which in principle allow for the (more-or-less) free scrambling of syntactic arguments. The theoretical status of this default word order is not clear and this course will examine the topic of argument scrambling, word order freezing and default word order with respect to two main perspectives: 1) theoretical linguistics; 2) corpus linguistics.

With respect to the theoretical perspective, students will be introduced to current theories of case and word order so that we can examine what (if anything) these theories have to say about default word order and word order freezing in particular. With respect to the computational perspective, we will examine to what degree information from corpora can help guide the analysis and help us understand why things are scrambled when they are scrambled and what status the "default word order" actually has in terms of frequency and distribution. As part of the course (one day), we will also present psycholinguistic studies that identify (combinations of) features that determine word order preferences.

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Language and Computation introductory course:
Computational Lexical Semantics.

Teachers
  • Gemma Boleda ()
  • Stefan Evert ()
Abstract:

This course will provide students with an overview of current research in Computational Lexical Semantics, and with the necessary theoretical and methodological background to carry out their own research. Students will have an opportunity to work on practical examples, learning to tackle the difficulties mentioned above. Special emphasis will be put on the feedback between computational approaches and semantic theory.

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Logic and Computation advanced course:
Reasoning with Probabilities.

Teachers
  • Eric Pacuit ()
  • Joshua Sack ()

Course material: epprob-outline.pdf

Abstract:

Both logic and probability provide powerful tools for reasoning about uncertainty in a dynamic environment. Our goal in this course is to examine logical frameworks that incorporate probabilistic modeling of multiagent uncertainty. We will then see how merging these two perspectives on uncertainty can help clarify various conceptual issues and puzzles (such as the Monty Hall puzzle or the sleeping beauty problem). The primary objective is to explore the formal tools used by logicians, computer scientists, philosophers and game theorists for modeling uncertainty. We will focus on both the important conceptual issues (eg., Dutch book arguments, updating with probability zero events and higher-order probabilities) and the main technical results (eg., completeness and decidability of probabilistic modal logics).

Course Outline: The course will cover all of the following topics:

0. Background in dynamic epistemic logic and probabilistic models of uncertainty (including issues of measurability and Dutch book arguments)

1. Various puzzles about probability, beliefs and time (including the Monty Hall puzzle, the Sleeping Beauty problem and the Absent-Minded Driver problem)

2. Higher-order probability measures (including a definition of "common p-belief'' and uses of the concept in game theory)

3. Modal probabilistic logic (including proofs of completeness, decidability, and other standard results)

4. Uncertainty in a dynamic environment (including Bayesian/Jeffrey updates)

5. Updating with probability zero events (including lexicographic probability distributions, conditional probability distributions and relations with belief revision models) 6. Dynamic Epistemic Probabilistic Logic (including discussion of reduction axioms and temporal extensions)

Prerequisites: This is an advanced but self-contained course. Students will be expected to have had some exposure to (dynamic) epistemic logic and probabilistic logic. In particular, it will be assumed that students have already been introduced to epistemic logic and some of its dynamic extensions (i.e., public announcement logic); and although we will introduce many basic concepts of probabilistic theory (e.g., measure spaces), it will be expected that students have had previous exposure to probabilistic models of uncertainty.

http://ai.stanford.edu/~epacuit/classes/esslli/epprob.html

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Week two 14:00 - 15:30

Language and Logic advanced course:
Advances in Abstract Categorial Grammars: Language theory and linguistic modeling.

Teachers

Course material: esslli-acg-week-2.pdf

External page

Abstract:

The abstract categorial grammar (ACG) (de Groote 2001), a grammar formalism based on the typed lambda calculus, elegantly generalizes and unifies a variety of grammar formalisms that have been proposed for the description of formal and natural languages. The first part of this course investigates formal-language-theoretic properties of "second-order" ACGs, a subclass of ACGs that have "context-free" derivations. Their generative capacity is precisely characterized, and an efficient Earley-style algorithm is presented. The second part of the course turns to linguistic applications of ACGs and gives various illustrations of how ACGs provide flexible and explicit ways to model the syntax-semantics interface of natural language.

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Language and Logic workshop:
New Directions in the Theory of Presupposition.

Organizers

External page

Abstract:

The last ten years has seen a wealth of new developments on the topic of presupposition and, in particular, the projection problem for presupposition. While there had been considerable interest in the seventies in developing entirely pragmatic accounts of presupposition triggering and projection (Wilson, 1974, Stalnaker 1977, Grice, 1981), these accounts had generally not been sufficiently developed to match the dynamic accounts developed in the eighties in predictive power. Recent work, such as that of Schlenker (2006, 2008), however, has shown that broadly pragmatic accounts can also have considerable predictive power. In addition, trivalent approaches based on such techniques as supervaluations and the Strong Kleene connectives, which were dismissed by many long ago, have recently attracted new interest (Beaver and Krahmer, 2001, George, 2008, Fox, 2008) and have been shown capable of handling many empirical issues in presupposition projection. Thus there is no longer a clear consensus on how we should explain presupposition projection. In addition, experimental work has raised interesting questions about what the basic facts of presupposition projection are and suggests that real empirical work is needed to determine some of the subtleties (Chemla 2007). There has also been renewed interest in the triggering problem (Simons, 2001, Abusch, 2002) which naturally links up to the projection problem, as well as recent theoretical work on foundational issues such as the notion of common ground and accommodation (Beaver and Zeevat, 2004, von Fintel, 2001, 2006, Stalnaker, 2002). The purpose of this workshop is to bring together researchers on presupposition to discuss these new developments and connect some of the different theoretical and empirical questions, which are too often considered in isolation.

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Language and Computation introductory course:
Intelligent Computer-Assisted Language Learning: An introduction to an emerging interdisciplinary field.

Teacher Abstract:

Intelligent Computer-Assisted Language Learning (ICALL) is a relatively young field of interdisciplinary research exploring the integration of natural language processing in foreign language teaching. The course will introduce both the theoretical issues and the practical system development aspects of ICALL and provide the student with a firm basis for understanding the current research issues. Key questions discussed include the following: Where does ICALL fit into foreign language teaching? Why are notions such as noticing and awareness from cognitive psychology important for second language acquisition and ICALL research? How can natural language processing (NLP) be adapted to process learner language? What are the challenges for NLP in detecting properties of learner language and what is know about presenting feedback to learners? What are learner models and what roles do they play in ICALL systems? And last but not least, how can shallow semantic NLP analysis be used to provide feedback on meaning in addition to feedback on form, and why is this important?

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Language and Computation advanced course:
Linguistic Information Visualization.

Teachers
  • Gerald Penn ()
  • Sheelagh Carpendale ()

Course material: carpendale_penn.pdf

Abstract:

Much of what computational linguists fall back upon to improve natural language processing and model language "understanding" is structure that has, at best, only an indirect attestation in observable data. The sheer complexity of these structures, and the observable patterns on which they are based, however, usually limits their accessibility, often even to the researchers creating or studying them. Traditional statistical graphs and custom-designed data illustrations fill the pages of CL papers, providing insight into linguistic and algorithmic structures, but visual 'externalizations' such as these are almost exclusively used in CL for presentation and explanation.

Visualizations can also be used as an aid in the process of research itself. There are special statistical methods, falling under the rubric of "exploratory data analysis", and visualization techniques just for this purpose, in fact, but these are not widely used or even known in CL. These novel data visualization techniques offer the potential for creating new methods that reveal structure and detail in data. Visualization can provide new methods for interacting with large corpora, complex linguistic structures, and can lead to a better understanding of the states of stochastic processes.

Instructed by a team of computational linguists and information visualization researchers, this tutorial will bridge computational linguistic and information visualization expertise, providing attendees with a basis from which they can begin to leverage information visualization in their own research. It will equip participants with: - An understanding of the importance and applicability of information visualization techniques to computational linguistics research; - Knowledge of the basic principles of information visualization theory; - The ability to identify appropriate visualization software and techniques that are available for immediate use and for prototyping; - A working knowledge of research to date in the area of linguistic visualization.

This tutorial will be an extended version of the 3-hour tutorial offered at ACL-2008, which had 25 attendees. The instructors have previously taught portions of the content in advanced undergraduate and graduate courses as well. Students are expected to have a solid background in computational linguisics. No experience with visualization is required.

TUTORIAL OUTLINE

Day 1: Introduction; Information Visualization Theory (representational theory, cognitive psychology, preattentive processing, interaction & animation, assessing and validating visualizations)

Days 2 and 4: Review of Linguistic Visualizations (document content visualizations, text collection analysis, literary analysis, streaming data visualization, convergence of linguistic data and social network analysis, corpora exploration, visualization uncertainty in statistical NLP output, linguistic analysis, visualization of speech data)

Day 3: Tools for Visualization (software solutions: Excel, Tableau, Spotfire, programming toolkits: prefuse, processing, flare, InfoVis Toolkit, online tools: ManyEyes, Swivel, collaborative visualization tools in development)

Day 5: Case Study: Visualization for Statistical MT; Open Research Problems (CL problems that could benefit from visualization, Visualization of language areas that need CL expertise); Closing

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Logic and Computation advanced course:
Dynamic Logics for Interactive Belief Revision.

Teachers
  • Alexandru Baltag ()
  • Sonja Smets ()
Abstract:

This course is addressed to students and researchers interested in logics for reasoning about multi-agent belief revision, belief updates and knowledge updates induced by various forms of communication or interaction. It is a foundational course, designed to present to students and researchers from other fields the work done in recent years by a number of researchers on integrating ideas from Belief Revision Theory within the DEL (Dynamic-Epistemic Logic) paradigm. The course is self-contained, not assuming any background knowledge, but presupposing only some general experience or facility with using logical languages, the concepts of syntax and semantics etc. We start by presenting the main notions of "standard DEL", arguing that this logic is appropriate for updating "hard information" (unrevisable knowledge), but that it is inappropriate for "soft information" (possibly false beliefs or defeasible knowledge). We then present "belief-revision models", defining some important epistemic/doxastic notions, considering a number of logical languages for these models, and explaining the relevance of these notions to fundamental issues in contemporary Epistemology, in Computer Science and in the study of language and communication. We present various Belief Update operations and various belief-revision policies proposed by different authors, focusing on one particular proposal (the Action-Priority Update) of great generality and elegance. We present reduction laws (the "dynamic laws of Interactive Belief Revision"), complete axiomatizations, applications to dialogue games and communication strategies, connections with other research areas and open problems.

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Language and Logic introductory course:
Syntax and Semantics from an Algebraic Perspective.

Teachers
  • Edward Stabler ()
  • Edward Keenan ()

Course material: StablerKeenan-ESSLLI09-Syllabus.pdf Keenan09-Malagasy.pdf KeenanStabler05.pdf KeenanStabler09.pdf StablerKeenan07.pdf

Abstract:

Developing perspectives from Keenan and Stabler (2003), this class will explore algebraic methods for compositionally defining and comparing various languages (syntax and semantics), with particular attention to various constructions with quantification and binding in the world's languages.

Introduction: Language structure (!=trees) and universals (!=fixed constituent orders). A universal of anaphor binding.

Evans and Levinson (BBS, forthcoming) take Chomskyan linguistics to task for insufficient recognition of the diversity of human languages. This diversity, they claim, renders universal claims few in number and largely trivial in content, whence the monolithic picture of Universal Grammar that generative grammarians present to the CogSci community at large is inaccurate and misleading. Our response to this critique exhibits a novel format of universal generalization that has the mathematical rigor desired (if not always achieved) by a Chomskyan approach, but which incorporates (morpho)syntactic diversity in an essential way. More important than diversity per se is that languages exhibit non-universal structural regularities that speakers must learn. We illustrate this with universal claims concerning anaphora -- one of the areas in which E+L criticize the Chomskyan approach

Example 1: Affixes and structure in Malagasy, without movement.

Example 2: Quantification in 'minimalist grammar', with movement. A 'directly compositional' semantics for a grammar with 'quantifier raising'.

Language similarity 1: Stable automorphisms; perspectives on probabilistic language models.

Language similarity 2: Homomorphic realizations of canonical patterns of predication, modification, and binding.

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Week two 17:00 - 18:30

Logic and Computation introductory course:
Explanation in Ontology Languages.

Teachers
  • Bijan Parsia ()
  • Thomas Schneider ()

Course material: explanation.pdf

Abstract:

This course will present current research into explanations, which can answer questions such as: "Why do certain entailments follow from my ontology?"; "Why is my ontology inconsistent?"; "Which part of my ontology do I need to modify in order to prevent an undesired entailment?" These questions are of relevance to ontology developers in various domains including bioinformatics, medicine, geography, linguistics. We will focus on proof based explanation techniques and touch on the emerging field of model based explanation.

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Language and Logic advanced course:
Referent Systems.

Teachers
  • Udo Klein ()
  • Marcus Kracht ()
Abstract:

Formal systems for computing meanings often rely very strongly on syntactic structure, and rarely on other overt clues such as morphology. This makes them quite inflexible. The calculus of Referent Systems, due to Kees Vermeulen and further developed by the second lecturer, allows for much more flexible algorithms since it accesses both syntactic and morphological structure. The basic idea is that semantic composition is not performed by function application, but by a semantic operation which merges variables depending on the morphosyntactic properties associated with them. The main burden for calculating meanings of complex expressions is carried by the argument structure, which interfaces syntax, morphology and semantics. The system has been implemented (see ). The course will not only introduce the idea of referent systems and how they function, but also show how to implement and use the system.

The course assumes knowledge of formal semantics (DRT, for example) and some general knowledge of linguistics. All formal concepts will be properly introduced.

Proposed Content: Lec 1: Motivation and basic idea: Composing meanings Lec 2: Referent systems

Lec 3: Case Lec 4: Parameters Lec 5: Agreement Morphology and its Role in Semantics

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Language and Computation introductory course:
Corpus-Based Argument Structure.

Teacher Abstract:

The aim of the course is twofold. The linguistic goal is to discuss the notion of argument structure (valence) both from the syntactic and from the semantic point of view, with some emphasis on the argument/adjunct dichotomy and diathesis (argument alternations). The computational goal is to present diverse techniques of learning valence information from corpora. This automatic learning task is usually split into two stages: the linguistic stage of collecting information about the co-occurrence of argument-taking lexemes and various types of phrases (possible arguments), and the statistical inference stage at which reliable valence hypotheses are selected. Both stages will be discussed in detail. The course will conclude with the presentation of various evaluation methods and various uses of automatically extracted valence information. The closing bracket of the course will be the discussion of the extent to which automatic valence acquisition can help in distinguishing arguments from adjuncts.

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Language and Computation advanced course:
Distributional Semantic Models - Theory and Empirical Results.

Teachers
  • Stefan Evert ()
  • Alessandro Lenci ()

External page

Abstract:

Distributional semantic models (DSMs) are based on the assumption that the meaning of a word can (at least to a certain extent) be inferred from its usage, i.e. its distribution in text. Therefore, these models dynamically build semantic representations "in the form of multi-dimensional vector spaces" through a statistical analysis of the contexts in which words occur.

With their distributed vector-space representations, DSMs challenge traditional symbolic accounts of conceptual and semantic structures. However, their true ability to address key issues of lexical meaning is still poorly understood, and will have to be carefully evaluated in linguistic and cognitive research.

This course aims to equip participants with the necessary background knowledge for carrying out such research. In addition to the mathematical foundations of DSMs and their application to semantic analysis, we will put particular emphasis on relating the computational models to fundamental issues of semantic theory.

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Language and Logic workshop:
Formal approaches to sign languages.

Organizers
  • Carlo Cecchetto ()
  • Carlo Geraci ()

Course material: 02 Brentari Eccarius ESSLLI 2009.pdf 03 Schlenker ESSLLI 2009.pdf 04 Koulidobrova ESSLLI 2009.pdf 05 Davidson Caponigro Mayberry ESSLLI 2009.pdf 06 Neidle et al ESSLLI 2009.pdf 08 MathurRathmann ESSLLI 2009.pdf 09 Bernaht ESSLLI 2009.pdf 10 Aboh Pfau 2009 ESSLLI.pdf 11 Donati Branchini ESSLLI 2009.pdf

External page

Abstract:

The recognition that sign languages are natural languages in their own right, and not collections of gestures or impoverished codes lacking an autonomous grammar, begins with Stokoe (1960). With Stokoe's work, the methods linguists use to describe and investigate spoken languages are applied to sign languages as well. In recent years, linguistic work on sign languages has also developed in formal frameworks, in the areas of phonology, syntax, and semantics. One goal of the workshop is to bring together researchers from different areas of formal linguistics who are investigating sign languages. The grammars of sign languages are as highly complex as the grammars of spoken languages and share with them many universal features, despite the difference in modality between spoken languages (which use the auditory channel) and sign languages (which use the visual channel). Yet, sign languages also differ from spoken languages in radical ways: morphological information in sign languages is often conveyed simultaneously by different articulators rather than linearly; moreover, certain aspects of their phonological, syntactic and semantic structures are not commonly found in spoken languages. These differences raise an interesting challenge for existing formal linguistic frameworks, which are designed to account for the grammars of spoken languages. By bringing together formal linguists working on sign languages, the workshop should contribute to meet this challenge.

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Logic and Computation introductory course:
Logics and Agent Programming Languages

Teachers
  • Natasha Alechina ()
  • Brian Logan ()

External page

Keywords: agent programming languages, logical models of agency, verification

Abstract:

To create a language for programming entities capable of intelligent behaviour (`agents'), researchers and developers must address deep questions such as: what are the basic constituent parts of an intelligent agent; how should the agent `think' (e.g., which deliberation strategy should it employ -- should it plan a precise sequence of actions in advance or should it adopt an abstract plans with gaps `to be filled-in later'); what relationship should there be between the agent's beliefs and its goals, etc. In seeking to address these questions, researchers have drawn heavily on formal models of agents and on agent logics, including epistemic logics, logics of action, dynamic logic, coalition logics etc. For example, the development of agent programming languages such as AgentSpeak were heavily influenced by the BDI (Beliefs, Desires and Intentions) logics developed to understand what an agent's behaviour should be. These interactions have resulted in an extremely fruitful cross fertilisation between work in logic and computation, and the application of logical techniques to address key practical issues such as the verification of agent programs (i.e., will an agent program meet the specification set out by its developers).

This course will address key topics in logics of agent programs including: the Belief Desire Intention model; overview of agent programming languages based on the BDI model; relationship between the operational semantics of BDI-based agent programming languages and logics for reasoning about agents' beliefs and intentions; verification of agent programs using model checking and theorem proving. The course assumes some exposure to modal logic, but no prior knowledge of agent programming languages is required.

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