35.2816, Summer Schools: UMRs in Boston Summer School – 1st Call for Applications

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-35-2816. Fri Oct 11 2024. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 35.2816, Summer Schools: UMRs in Boston Summer School – 1st Call for Applications

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Date: 09-Oct-2024
From: Kristine Stenzel [Kristine.stenzel at colorado.edu]
Subject: UMRs in Boston Summer School – 1st Call for Applications


UMRs in Boston Summer School – 1st Call for Applications

Host Institution: Brandeis University, Waltham, USA
Coordinating Institution: University of Colorado Boulder

Dates: 09-Jun-2025 - 13-Jun-2025
Location: Waltham, MA

Focus: Uniform Meaning Representations (UMR)
Minimum Education Level: Graduate students and professionals

Special Qualifications:
See application form

Description:
UMRs in Boston Summer School – 1st Call for Applications
June 9-13, 2025
Brandeis University, Massachusetts, USA

We invite applications for a five-day summer school on Uniform Meaning
Representations (UMR).
Impressive progress has been made in many aspects of natural language
processing (NLP) in recent years. Most notably, the achievements of
transformer-based large language models such as ChatGPT would seem to
obviate the need for any type of semantic representation beyond what
can be encoded as contextualized word embeddings of surface text.
Advances have been particularly notable in areas where large training
data sets exist, and it is advantageous to build an end-to-end
training architecture without resorting to intermediate
representations. For any truly interactive NLP applications, however,
a more complete understanding of the information conveyed by each
sentence is needed to advance the state of the art. Here,
"understanding'' entails the use of some form of meaning
representation. NLP techniques that can accurately capture the
required elements of the meaning of each utterance in a formal
representation are critical to making progress in these areas and have
long been a central goal of the field. As with end-to-end NLP
applications, the dominant approach for deriving meaning
representations from raw textual data is through the use of machine
learning and appropriate training data. This allows the development of
systems that can assign appropriate meaning representations to
previously unseen text.
In this five-day course, instructors from the University of Colorado
and Brandeis University will describe the framework of Uniform Meaning
Representations (UMRs), a recent cross-lingual, multi-sentence
incarnation of Abstract Meaning Representations (AMRs), that addresses
these issues and comprises such a transformative representation.
Incorporating Named Entity tagging, discourse relations,
intra-sentential coreference, negation and modality, and the popular
PropBank-style predicate argument structures with semantic role labels
into a single directed acyclic graph structure, UMR builds on AMR and
keeps the essential characteristics of AMR while making it
cross-lingual and extending it to be a document-level representation.
It also adds aspect, multi-sentence coreference and temporal
relations, and scope. Each day will include lectures and hands-on
practice.

Topics to be covered may include the following, among others:
1.      The basic structural representation of UMR and its application
to multiple languages;
2.      How UMR encodes different types of MWE (multi-word
expressions), discourse and temporal relations, and TAM
(tense-aspect-modality) information in multiple languages, and
differences between AMR and UMR;
3.      Going from IGT (interlinear glossed text) to UMR graphs
semi-automatically;
4.      Formal semantic interpretation of UMR incorporating a
continuation-based semantics for scope phenomena involving modality,
negation, and quantification;
5.      Extension to UMR for encoding gesture in multimodal dialogue,
Gesture AMR (GAMR), which aligns with speech-based UMR to account for
situated grounding in dialogue.
6.      UMR parsing and applications

To apply, please complete this form by Nov. 15, 2024.
https://www.colorado.edu/linguistics/umrs-boston-summer-school-applica
tion
Other important dates:
●       Notification of acceptance:     Dec. 15, 2024
●       Confirmation of participation:  Jan. 31, 2025

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics
                     Semantics

Participation will be fully funded (reasonable airfare, lodging, and
meals). This summer school has been made possible by funding from NSF
Collaborative Research: Building a Broad Infrastructure for Uniform
Meaning Representations (Award # 2213805), with additional support
from Brandeis University.

Financial Aid Instructions:
See application form

Registration Open until 15-Nov-2024

Contact Person: Kristine Stenzel
                Email: Kristine.stenzel at colorado.edu

Apply on the web: https://www.colorado.edu/linguistics/umrs-boston-sum
mer-school-application

Registration Instructions:
Please see application form
Applications now being accepted, until Nov. 15, 2024.

Other important dates:
●       Notification of acceptance:     Dec. 15, 2024
●       Confirmation of participation:  Jan. 31, 2025



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