Past Events

Curs del programa de mobilitat
Edit Doron (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Morphosyntax and Argument Structure
May 7-11, 2012

Class 1: The category of voice
Class 2: The causative component of psych-verbs
Class 3: The interaction of adjectival passive and voice
Class 4: Argument alternation in verbs of detaching

Workshop: Combining Clauses in Sign Language
April 19, 2012

Program:
09.30h – 10.10h: Carlo Cecchetto (Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca): Combining constituents into clauses: evidence for a hierarchical structure in LIS
10.10h – 10.50h: Roland Pfau (University of Amsterdam): On the syntax of spatial adpositions in sign languages – simple and complex clauses
10.50h – 11.20h: Coffee break
11.20h – 12h: Markus Steinbach (Georg-August-Universität): Role-shift reconsidered

Workshop: Approaches to unbounded dependencies
March 22, 2012

Program:
10:00—11:00: Mary Dalrymple: Nested and crossing dependencies
11:00—11:30: coffee break
11:30—12:30: Laia Mayol: The processing of all-focus structures in Catalan
12:30—15:00: Lunch break
15:00—16:00: Yehuda Falk: Superiority effects
16:00—17:00: Ash Asudeh: Where are we and where should we go?

This workshop was funded by the research project The Syntax and Information Structure of Unbounded Dependencies (Ref. FFI2011-23046).

4th Biennial Conference on Experimental Pragmatics
June 2-4, 2011

UR-Ling PhD student workshop
April 24, 2011

Intensive reading group on events and related topics
November 12-13, 2010

Course in Computational Semantics and Pragmatics
Raquel Fernández (University of Amsterdam), Referring in Dialogue
May 31 - June 9, 2010

Course description:
This monographic course is part of the broader course Computational Semantics and Pragmatics (whose first part was taught by Stefan Bott). The aim of the course is to give an overview of seminal and current research on the generation and resolution of referring expressions from the perspective of Dialogue Modelling. We will start with a short overview of research on Dialogue Modelling, paying special attention to referring in dialogue. For the rest of the course, we'll concentrate on a small number of specific issues and look into them in detail. We will first address issues related to the generation of referring expressions, introducing classic approaches that aim to generate distinguishing expressions while satisfying general pragmatic principles. We will then move on to discuss psycholinguistic approaches to collaborative reference and introduce recent computational work that attempts to implement aspects of these approaches (such as alignment and adaptation effects) in dialogue systems. In the final part of the course, we'll look into aspects related to the interpretation and resolution of referring expressions, both from a computational and psycholinguistics perspective.

For more information, please consult the webpage: http://staff.science.uva.nl/~raquel/rid-upf2010.html.

UR-Ling PhD student workshop
April 29, 2010

XX Colloquium on Generative Grammar
March 18-20, 2010

Workshop on the Subatomic Semantics of Event Predicates
March 17, 2010

Mini-Workshop on Nominalizations
December 14, 2009

Curs del programa de mobilitat
Marco Baroni (University of Trento), Vector-based models of semantic relatedness
June 8-11, 2009

Course description:
A large and growing tradition in computational linguistics and cognitive science (e.g., Lund & Burgess 1996, Landauer & Dumais 1997, Schuetze 1997, Rapp 2003, Sahlgren 2006, Pado & Lapata 2007) has shown that simple word co-occurrence statistics extracted from corpora capture important facets of lexical meaning. In this introductory lecture, I will focus on the class of corpus-based models that represent the distributional profile of a word as a vector, and use standard geometrical tools to capture relations between words in the resulting vector space. After discussing the intuition behind these approaches and introducing the basic formal machinery, I will describe different models that have been proposed, focusing in particular on how they differ in terms of representation of linguistic context and on the role played by dimensionality reduction techniques. I will then discuss various ways in which the models have been evaluated, and I will conclude with my view of the most important open issues in the field.

slides day 1 (Distributional Lexical Semantics I: A general introduction)
slides day 2 (Distributional Lexical Semantics II: Getting into the details)
slides day 3 (Distributional semantics III: One distributional semantics, many semantic relations)
slides day 4 (Distributional semantics IV: Is distributional semantics really "semantics"?)
references

International Workshop: Events across Categories
held at the CSIC in Madrid, May 27-28, 2009

IV Nereus International Workshop: Definiteness and DP Structure in Romance Languages
October 9-10, 2008

Curs del programa de mobilitat
Ann Copestake (Cambridge University), Combining data-driven and generative approaches in semantics and pragmatics
May 29 - June 4, 2008

Course description:
Formal linguistics has emphasised the idea of language as being essentially generative: words can be combined into phrases, phrases into utterances and so on, and meaning is built up compositionally. A hearer is expected to use reasoning on the basis of world knowledge and assumptions about the context and the speaker to fully understand an utterance. However, data-driven techniques, pioneered within computational linguistics, have given us a methodology for looking at aspects of language where these assumptions break down, including the role of frequency in disambiguation, conventionalised speech act formulae, multiword expressions, collocation and lexical semantics. In this course, we will look at a range of phenomena where the boundary between generativity and conventionality is unclear and see a variety of ways in which data-driven and symbolic techniques can be combined.

slides day 1 (Computational linguistics and linguistics)
slides day 2 (Compound nouns)
slides day 3 (Generative lexicon and logical metonymy)
slides day 4 (Idioms. Speech acts and conventionalisation.)
slides day 5 (Generation and lexical selection)

Workshop on Reference to Abstract Objects in Natural Language
March 28-29, 2008

Sinn und Bedeutung 11
September 21-23, 2006

Annual meeting of the Gesellschaft für Semantik, held at the Departament de Traducció i Filologia, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona.

GLiF Formal Linguistics Research Group

Past Events

Past Events