CSC 2519 -- Natural Language Semantics

Fall 2010

Index of this document

Contact information
Meeting times
Readings
Tentative course outline
Calendar of important course-related events
Evaluation
Announcements

Contact information

Instructor: Gerald Penn

Office: PT 396B (St. George campus)

Tel: 978-7390

Email: gpenn@cs.utoronto.ca

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Meeting times

Lectures: T 3-5, PT 378

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Presented Readings

Who

When

What

Where

Siavash Kazemian

7 December

Bagpack: A General Framework to Represent Semantic Relations, A. Herdagdelen and M. Baroni

Scaling Distributional Similarity to Large Corpora, J. Gorman and J.R. Curran

GEMS 1, 2009

N/A

30 November

NO MEETING

23 November

Measuring Distributional Similarity in Context, G. Dinu and M. Lapata

Learning Continuous Phrase Representations and Syntactic Parsing with Recursive Neural Networks, R. Socher, C.D. Manning and A.Y. Ng

16 November

Unsupervised Classification with Dependency Based Word Spaces, K. Rothenhaeusler and H. Schuetze

Convolution Kernels for Natural Language, M. Collins and N. Duffy

A Study of Convolution Tree Kernel with Local Alignment, L. Zhang and K-P. Chan

GEMS 1, 2009

GEMS 1, 2009

16 November

Word Space Models of Lexical Variation, Y. Peirsman and D. Speelman

Semantic Density Analysis: Comparing Word Meaning across Time and Phonetic Space, E. Sagi, S. Kaufmann and B. Clark

GEMS 1, 2009

GEMS 1, 2009

9 November

Frames and the Semantics of Understanding, C. J. Fillmore

Background to FrameNet, C.J. Fillmore, C.R. Johnson and M.R.L. Petruck

Manifold Learning for the Semi-Supervised Induction of FrameNet Predicates: an Empirical Investigation, D. Croce and D. Previtali

Quaderni di Semantica 6(2), 1985

Intl. Jounral of Lexicography 16(3):235-250.

GEMS 2, 2010

2 November

Automatic Labelling of Semantic Roles, D. Gildea and D. Jurafsky

Computational Linguistics 28(4).

Serguei Zinine

2 November

Semantic Similarity based on Corpus Statistics and Lexical Taxonomy, J. J. Jiang and D. W. Conrath

ROCLING 10, 1997.

26 October

Introduction to WordNet

Semantic Similarity in a Taxonomy: an Information-based Measure and its Application to Problems of Ambiguity in Natural Language, P. Resnik

Five Papers on WordNet, Princeton University, pp. 1-25 (the first two papers).

JAIR 11.

19 October

Context-theoretic Semantics for Natural Language: an Overview, D. Clarke

Semantic Composition with Quotient Algebras, D. Clarke, R. Lutz and D. Weir

GEMS 1, 2009

GEMS 2, 2010

12 October

Ranking Parapharses in Context, S. Thater, G. Dinu and M. Pinkal

Contextualizing Semantic Representations using Syntactically Enriched Vector Models, S. Thater, H. Fuerstenau and M. Pinkal

ACL/IJCNLP-09 Workshop on Applied Textual Inference

12 October

A Structured Vector Space Model for Word Meaning in Context, K. Erk and S. Pado'

Exemplar-based Models for Word Meaning in Context, K. Erk and S. Pado'

5 October

Capturing Nonlinear Structure in Word Spaces through Dimensionality Reduction, D. Jurgens and K. Stevens

Locality Preserving Projections, X. He and P. Niyogi

GEMS 2, 2010

NIPS-16, 2003.

28 September

Vector-based models of semantic composition, J. Mitchell and M. Lapata.

Varada Kolhatkar

28 September

Expectation vectors: a semitotics-inspired approach to geometric lexical-semantic representation, J. Washtell.

GEMS 2, 2010

Gerald Penn

14,21 September;
5,19 October

Singular Value Decomposition

Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing, C. Manning and H. Schuetze, MIT Press, 1999.

Additional Readings for the Lectures

Title	Author	Publication Details
Logic, Language and Meaning, vols. 1 and 2	L.T.F. Gamut	University of Chicago Press, 1991.
Type-Logical Semantics	B. Carpenter	MIT Press, 1997.

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Tentative course outline

Latent semantic indexing
Lexical similarity measures: Jiang-Conrath, Wu-Palmer, Lin
Lambda calculus and higher-order intensional logic
Categorial grammars: Lambek vs. combinatory
Classification: decision trees, rule induction, maximum entropy, logistic regression
Sources of inference rules: WordNet, SUMO, FrameNet, PropBank, the Allen temporal algebra
Grammatical functions, semantic roles, dependency graphs
Resolution-theorem proving and model-checking
Unification and subsumption, basic lattice theory

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Calendar of important course-related events

Date	Event
Tue, 14 September	First meeting
Wed, 6 October	Last day to add course
Tue, 19 October	Proposals for final projects due
Wed, 3 November	Last day to drop course
Tue, 30 November	No meeting
Tue, 7 December	Last meeting
Fri, 17 December	Term papers/projects due

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Evaluation

Your final mark will be determined by a term paper/project, and a presentation of one or more papers in class. The relative weights of these components towards the final mark are shown in the table below:

Class presentation	20%
Term paper/project	80%

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Announcements

In this space, you will find announcements related to the course. Please check this space at least weekly.

19 October: MATERIAL COVERED IN LECTURE 4: positive definite matrices and their eigenvalues.
5 October: MATERIAL COVERED IN LECTURE 3: convergence of the QR method.
5 October: Don't forget: proposal for final projects are due on 19th October.
21 September: MATERIAL COVERED IN LECTURE 2: Gram-Schmidt orthogonalization, Rayleigh quotients, the correctness proof for the "QR method" of finding eigenvalues.
14 September: MATERIAL COVERED IN LECTURE 1: singular-value decomposition, latent semantic indexing.

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Gerald Penn, 25 November, 2010
This web-page was adapted from the web-page for another course, created by Vassos Hadzilacos.