Fall 2005

Course Overview:

Lexical semantics (the semantics of words) is becoming an increasingly important part of Natural Language Processing, as researchers and systems are beginning to address semantics at the large scale. This course covers aspects in NLP/AI, Semantics/Philosophy, Linguistics/Lexicography, and Ontologies/KR. This course addresses several core issues in the study of the semantics of words, including the definition of lexical semantics from various perspectives, the problem of primitives of meaning, the creation of semantically annotated corpora, ontologies, automated methods for acquiring semantic knowledge on a large scale, and a survey of related perspectives.

Assignments

There will be four homework assignments, each counting 25%.

• Assignment 1: Due no later than September 30, 2005 at 11:59pm.
• Assignment 2: Due no later than November 10, 2005.
• Assignment 3: Due no later than December 1, 2005.
• Assignment 4: Part I is due no later than November 15, 2005; Part II is due no later than November 22, 2005; Part III is due no later than December 9, 2005.

Prerequisites

There are no prerequisites for this course, though familiarity with AI, general programming, introductory linguistics, and introductory formal semantics would help.

Office Hours

TBA.

Required Text

TBA.

Recommended Texts

• D. A. Cruse. 1986. Lexical Semantics. Cambridge University Press.
• C. Fellbaum. 1998. WordNet: An Electronic Lexical Database. MIT Press.
• J. Pustejovsky and S. Bergler (Eds.) 1991. Lexical Semantics and Knowledge Representation. Springer-Verlag.
• Beth Levin. 1993. English Verb Classes and Alternations : A Preliminary Investigation. University Of Chicago Press.
• Ray Jackendoff. 1992. Semantic Structures. MIT Press
• The instructors will recommend foundation and cutting edge papers as weekly readings.

Topics:

Module 1 - Computational Lexical Semantics (Prof. Pantel)
Computational formulation of lexical semantics; statistics and information theory; automated methods for harvesting semantics (corpus- and web-based), applications (building a thesaurus, extracting paraphrases, discovering word classes, inducing word senses, automatically linking learned knowledge into formal ontologies)
August 25, 30; September 1, 6, 8; October 27

Module 2 - Deep Lexical Semantics (Prof. Hobbs)
Introduction to deep lexical semantics; interpretation as abduction; cognition and the cognitive lexicon; time and the word "Now"; causality and modality, similarity and the preposition "Like"
September 13, 15, 20, 27; October 13, 18, 20

Module 3 - Ontologies (Prof. Hovy)
Introduction to ontologies; semantic primitives; ontologies for shallow semantics; upper models; middle models and verb sense frames; the Omega ontology
September 22, 29; November 8, 10, 15, 17, 22

Module 4 - Linguistic Issues (Prof. Belvin)
Semantic cases, thematic relations hypothesis, semantic fields; lexical semantic decomposition; verb classes and alternations; formalisms and notation; mapping; lexicographical perspectives
October 4, 6, 11, 25; November 1, 3, 29

Module 5 - Annotation of Shallow Semantics (Prof. Hovy)
Sense annotation as in PropBank; the giant leap from senses to concepts; annotation and verification of sense and concept creation
November 17, 22

Schedule:

Lectures will be held in GFS107, Tuesdays/Thursdays 2pm-3:20pm