CLS: Learning Compositional Semantics

[Zuidema, Jelle]

Dear all,

Next week, we'll have (finally) a CLS meeting again - and we'll make it a double bill! The theme is Learning Compositional Semantics, but the to talks approach it from quite different directions.

Sander Latour and Frank Smit will present their game-like environment used to generate a semantically-annotated corpus that might be use for learning. Phong Le will review the recent literature on machine learning of semantic parsers - many of them learning from semantically annotated corpora.

Date: April 25th
Location: ScP B0.209

Program:
16h00-16h45 Sander Latour & Frank Smit, Semantics Construction Environment for Non-Experts (abstract below)
(including 15 mins discussion)
16h45-17h15 Phong Le: Learning Semantic Parsing

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Not really CLS, but interesting for many of you, so don't forget Tecumseh Fitch's SMART Cognitive Science Lecture this Friday, at 4pm in UT3.01 (Nieuwe Doelenstraat 16). See http://smartcognitivescience.wordpress.com

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Semantics Construction Environment for Non-Experts

Sander Latour & Frank Smit

Abstract:

Over a one month period we've developed a series of online games that require the user to convert pictorial scenes to natural language sentences and vice versa. The result of these games was a parallel corpus of english sentences aligned with a structural description of the scenes. These structural descriptions cater for conversion to a desired formal semantic representation. The games were played by non-expert users in the Amazon Mechanical Turk environment, of which the corpus was evaluated manually on usefulness. The result of this project is a proof of concept that shows the potential of the game-based approach in creating corpora.