[CLS] final reminder - today at 3pm: Lappin & van Eijck: Probabilistic Semantics for Natural Language

[Jelle Zuidema]

*Reminder & change of location*

This afternoon (Sept 14th, 3pm, Beta Lounge:B1.25), Shalom Lappin
(King's College London) and Jan van Eijck (CWI) will talk on

*Probabilistic Semantics for Natural Language*

This is a joint session with the DIP-seminar. *Note*: we have moved to
B1.25 (the "beta lounge"), near the library in the main building. This
is a larger room than the one originally booked, but still not huge:
please be on time if you want to be sure of a seat.

*Abstract*

Probabilistic and stochastic methods have been fruitfully applied to a
wide variety of problems in grammar induction, natural language
processing, and cognitive modeling. In this talk I will explore the
possibility of developing a class of combinatorial semantic
representations for natural languages that compute the semantic value of
a (declarative) sentence as a probability value which expresses the
likelihood of speakers of the language accepting the sentence as true in
a given model. Such an approach to semantic representation treats the
pervasive gradience of semantic properties as intrinsic to speakers'
linguistic knowledge, rather the result of the interference of
performance factors in processing and interpretation. In order for this
research program to succeed, it must solve three central problems.
First, it needs to formulate a type system that computes the probability
value of a sentence from the semantic values of its syntactic
constituents. Second, it must incorporate a viable probabilitic logic
into the representation of semantic knowledge in order to model meaning
entailment. Finally, it must show how the specified class of semantic
representations can be efficiently learned from the primary linguistic
data available for language acquisition. This research has developed out
of recent work with Alex Clark (Royal Holloway, London) on the
application of computational learning theory to grammar induction.