Linguistics 575: Semantic Representations

Spring quarter, 2013

Course Info

Lecture: Mondays, 3:30-5:50 in MGH 284 and online
Our GoPost bulletin board
Our CollectIt dropbox
Our CommonView page for course recordings and files not otherwise accessible on the web.

Instructor Info

Emily M. Bender
Office Hours: Fridays 1-3 starting 4/19 & by appointment
Office: Padelford A-219
Phone: 543-6914
Email: ebender at u

Syllabus

Description

The English Resource Grammar (Flickinger 2000, 2011) is a broad-coverage precision grammar for English, written in HPSG (Pollard and Sag 1994) and producing semantic representations in the format of Minimal Recursion Semantics (Copestake et al 2005). It encompasses analyses of a wide range of phenomena in English, and a key piece of each analysis is the design of the resulting semantic representation. The MRS representations are built compositionally by the grammar and represent a significant abstraction away from the surface string. At the same time, they are still relatively closely tied to the surface string, when compared to other encoding systems for knowledge (and meaning) which have been proposed.

The goal of this seminar is to come to a better understanding of the relationship between the information encoded in MRS (as produced by the ERG) and the information needs of downstream applications which take semantic representations as input. We will begin with an overview of MRS, and then move to alternative meaning representations. Term projects will involve developing mappings between MRS and other representations, based on data sets which have target representations included in their annotations. It is expected that each such mapping will reveal information that is in the MRS but not in the target representation and vice versa.

Note: To request academic accommodations due to a disability, please contact Disabled Student Services, 448 Schmitz, 206-543-8924 (V/TTY). If you have a letter from Disabled Student Services indicating that you have a disability which requires academic accommodations, please present the letter to the instructor so we can discuss the accommodations you might need in this class.

Requirements

KWLH paper (approx 7 pages) (20).
Smaller assignments (10)
In-class presentations (5)
Participation in discussions (15).
Term project (50).

Schedule of Topics and Assignments (may be updated)

Date	Topic	Reading	Due
4/1	Introduction, organization What is meaning? What is semantics? The DELPH-IN ecology	Szabó 2012, Speaks 2010
4/5			Sample MRS output from the ERG
4/8	The Conduit Metaphor Minimal Recursion Semantics	Reddy 1979, Clark 1996 (Ch 5 -- available on CommonView), Copestake et al 2005	KWLH: K and W due
4/15	Target corpora presentations		Target corpora descriptions
4/22	LFG, GMB	Crouch 2005, Crouch and King 2006 Basile et al 2012, Venhuizen et al 2013
4/29	Evaluation, evaluation presentations	Zhang et al ms (Section 5)
5/3			Evaluation plan descriptions
5/6	Quantifier scope	Koller and Thater 2005, Koller et al 2008, Evang and Bos 2013
5/13	Reading MRSs
5/20	Term project presentations
5/27	No class: Memorial Day holiday
6/3	Term project presentations		KWLH papers due
6/13			Final projects due 11pm

Bibliography

Baker, Collin F., Charles J. Fillmore, and John B. Lowe. 1998. The Berkeley FrameNet project. Proceedings of the 17th international conference on Computational linguistics-Volume 1. Association for Computational Linguistics, 1998.
Basile, Valerio, et al. 2012. Developing a large semantically annotated corpus. Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12).
Clark, Herbert H. 1996. Using language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Copestake, A., Flickinger, D., Pollard, C., & Sag, I. A. 2005. Minimal recursion semantics: An introduction. Research on Language & Computation, 3 (4), 281-332.
Crouch, Richard. 2005. Packed rewriting for mapping semantics to KR. Proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Computational Semantics.
Crouch, Dick, and Tracy Holloway King. 2006. Semantics via f-structure rewriting. Proceedings of the LFG06 Conference.
Dridan, Rebecca and Stephan Oepen. 2011. Parser evaluation using elementary dependency matching. Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Parsing Technologies. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Kilian Evang, Johan Bos. 2013. Scope Disambiguation as a Tagging Task. Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Computational Semantics (IWCS 2013), pp 314-320, Potsdam, Germany
Kim, J-D., et al. 2003. GENIA corpus--a semantically annotated corpus for bio-textmining. Bioinformatics 19.suppl 1: i180-i182.
Koller, Alexander, Michaela Regneri, and Stefan Thater. 2008. Regular tree grammars as a formalism for scope underspecification. Proceedings of ACL-08: HLT.
Koller, Alexander, and Stefan Thater. 2005. Efficient solving and exploration of scope ambiguities. Proceedings of the ACL 2005 on Interactive poster and demonstration sessions. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Venhuizen, Noortje, Johan Bos, and Harm Brouwer. 2013 Parsimonious Semantic Representations with Projection Pointers. Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Computational Semantics (IWCS 2013), pp 252-263, Potsdam, Germany
Palmer, Martha, Daniel Gildea, and Paul Kingsbury. 2005. The proposition bank: An annotated corpus of semantic roles. Computational Linguistics 31.1: 71-106.
Reddy, Michael J. 1979. The conduit metaphor: A case of frame conflict in our language about language. Metaphor and thought 2: 164-201.
Roberts, Angus, et al. 2009. Building a semantically annotated corpus of clinical texts. Journal of biomedical informatics 42.5: 950-966.

ebender at u dot washington dot edu

Last modified: 3/31/13