CLS Speaker Series: Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh - Tuesday, 16/10, 12:00, F3.20, SP 107

[Elia Bruni]

Dear all,

The next CLS seminar will be given by Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh from Queen Mary University of London. The talk will take place at 12pm on Tuesday, 16 October in F3.20.

The abstract and title are below. Hope to see many of you there!

If you'd like to meet with Mehrnoosh or join her for lunch, please
email Martha Lewis (marthafli...@gmail.com).

Best,
Elia

Title: Exploring Semantic Incrementally with Dynamic Syntax and Vector
Space Semantics

Abstract: Vector space semantics uses contexts of words to reason
about their meanings; it is motivated by ideas of Firth and Harris,
uses co-occurrence matrices to assign vectors to words, and has
applications in  diverse NLP tasks, from named entity recognition, to
parsing, to disambiguation. Distributional semantics has been extended
from words to sentences, using different grammatical formalisms, such
as Lambek’s pregroups, the Lambek Calculus, and Combinatorial
Categorial Grammar. It has, however, not been considered for
incremental and dialogue pheonema. These phenomena cover individual
language processing,  where hearers  incrementally disambiguate word
senses before sentences are even complete,  and  dialogue utterances,
where  more than one agent contribute to the unfolding of a sequence.
In recent joint work with Purver, Hough, and Kempson (SemDial 2018),
we defined  an incremental vector space semantic model using  the
formalism of Dynamic Syntax and showed how it can incrementally assign
a semantic plausibility measure as it performs word-by-word parses of
utterances.