27.685, Calls: Cog Sci, Comp Ling, Semantics, Syntax, Text/Corpus Ling/USA

Thu Feb 4 21:32:32 UTC 2016

LINGUIST List: Vol-27-685. Thu Feb 04 2016. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 27.685, Calls: Cog Sci, Comp Ling, Semantics, Syntax, Text/Corpus Ling/USA

Moderators: linguist at linguistlist.org (Damir Cavar, Malgorzata E. Cavar)
Reviews: reviews at linguistlist.org (Anthony Aristar, Helen Aristar-Dry, Sara Couture)
Homepage: http://linguistlist.org

*****************    LINGUIST List Support    *****************
                   25 years of LINGUIST List!
Please support the LL editors and operation with a donation at:
           http://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/

Editor for this issue: Anna White <awhite at linguistlist.org>
================================================================

Date: Thu, 04 Feb 2016 16:32:18
From: Dimitrios Kartsaklis [d.kartsaklis at qmul.ac.uk]
Subject: NASSLLI Workshop on Statistical and Logical Models of Meaning

Full Title: NASSLLI Workshop on Statistical and Logical Models of Meaning 
Short Title: SaLMoM 

Date: 11-Jul-2016 - 15-Jul-2016
Location: New Jersey, USA 
Contact Person: Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh
Meeting Email: mehrnoosh.sadrzadeh at qmul.ac.uk
Web Site: https://sites.google.com/site/statlogmeaning/ 

Linguistic Field(s): Cognitive Science; Computational Linguistics; Semantics; Syntax; Text/Corpus Linguistics 

Call Deadline: 01-Apr-2016 

Meeting Description:

Mathematical models of natural language semantics oscillate between the
two opposing approaches of word-based statistical and sentence-based
compositional.

Word-based models rely on the ideas of Harris and Firth that words occurring
in similar contexts have similar meanings. They gather co-occurrence
information for words from large corpora of data, represent this information
as vectors in a vector space, and reason about meaning similarity using
measures such as geometric distance. These vector models can be traced back to
Lund and Burgess 1996, Schutze 1998, and Lin 1998.

Compositional models, in the sense of Montague 1970, systematically
associate the steps of a syntactic derivation with semantic operations acting
on the interpretations of the constituents. With respect to word meanings, the
compositional approach is agnostic, hence the joke: the meaning of life is
LIFE. The compositional design comes out particularly well in categorial
type-logics, where a derivation takes the form of a proof in a calculus of
syntactic types, which is then mapped compositionally to a derivation in a
semantic type calculus. Pioneering work on the calculus of syntactic types was
done by Lambek 1958, 1961; in the 1980s, Van Benthem combined this with
compositional interpretation along the lines of Curry's ''proofs as programs''
ideas.

There has been a recent wave in combining these approaches to obtain vector
representations for meaning of sentences in a compositional way. Some
references here are Mitchel and Lapata 2008, Clark and Pulman 2009, Baroni and
Zamparelli 2010, Coecke, Clark, Sadrzadeh 2010, Grefenstette and Sadrzadeh
2011. Despite their initial promise, these models are still in their infancy,
either modelling composition by a structure-forgetting operation such as
vector addition, or restricting attention to small fragments of language such
as adjective noun combinations and transitive sentences.

In the mean time, within the compositional type-logical group a variety of
techniques have been developed to overcome the expressive limitations of the
original calculi, resulting in grammar logics that can face the computational
confrontation with real data. One can think here of multimodal extensions of
categorial grammars in the logical and combinatorial traditions; calculi of
discontinuity combining concatenation and wrapping operations; hybrid
type-logical grammars mixing directional and non-directional operations;
continuation-based semantic approaches. References include Moortgat 1996,
2009, Steedman 2001, Morrill-Valentin-Fadda 2011, Kubota-Levine 2013,
Barker-Shan 2014. What these approaches have in common is that interpretations
are set up in terms of set-theoretic models, and that corpus-based statistical
data for word meanings have not yet been incorporated.

This workshop is an attempt to bring together active researchers of these
seemingly separate fields to address problems of both theoretical and
practical nature. One major goal is to introduce the statistical researchers
to the advanced type-logical techniques that have been developed to handle
challenging grammatical phenomena; the second one is to help the researchers
of the logical field to enhance their systems with vector representations. The
overall goal is to help both groups collaborate to develop systems where both
word vectors and complex grammatical structures can be reasoned about in a
compositional and computationally tractable way.

Call for Papers:

We invite submissions in the form of 2-page abstracts on topics relating
statistical and logical models of natural language. This can be a summary of
an already published paper or a new contribution.

On the statistical side, we welcome, for example, submissions on
distributional and probabilistic semantics and vector space models of meaning.
In this relation we encourage work that goes beyond subject-verb-object
constructions and addresses logical and functional words such as coordinators,
quantifiers, and prepositions.

On the logical side, we invite work on type-logical approaches such as
multimodal extensions of categorial grammars in the logical and
combinatorial traditions; calculi of discontinuity combining Concatenation and
wrapping operations; hybrid type-logical grammars mixing Directional and
non-directional modes; and continuation-based semantic approaches.

Submissions will be evaluated as to their potential for establishing
meaningful links between the logical and statistical approaches.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

*****************    LINGUIST List Support    *****************
Please support the LL editors and operation with a donation at:
            http://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/

----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-27-685	
----------------------------------------------------------