Lecture 1: Underspecification in Form and Meaning
Artemis Alexiadou (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
Wednesday March 7, 9:30-10:30
In this talk I will revisit the complex relationship between form and meaning of linguistic expressions by focusing on the realization and interpretation of plurality. The main questions under investigation are: is the meaning of the plural identical across languages? How does the realization of plurality relate to its interpretation? How is plurality represented within a language and across languages? By applying experimental methodology as well as cross-linguistic comparisons, the aim is to offer a contribution towards a unified theory of plural number for morphology, syntax, and semantics/pragmatics.
Lecture 2: On beyond 'The'
Roberto Zamparelli (Università degli Studi di Trento)
Wednesday March 7, 11:30-12:30
A growing body of research is uncovering the need to let noun phrases be definite in more than one way (in particular, distinguishing previous-mention and uniqueness definites, Schwarz 2009, 2013, Jenks 2017), but also to let definiteness be marked in multiple ways, both across and within languages. In this talk, I will focus on all those aspects of the syntax/semantics interface which mark definiteness without resorting to a simple definite (especially possessives and coordination), and use it as a test case to discuss past and present linguistic methodologies.
Lecture 3: Classifying Common Sense Knowledge Relations and Using them in NLP Tasks
Anette Frank (Universität Heidelberg)
Friday March 9, 9:00-10:00
Natural Language Processing has made great progress in analyzing discourse at a semantic level using corpus-based (deep) learning methods. While some types of semantic relations can today be learned and classified efficiently using dense representations learned from large corpora, common sense knowledge is still very difficult to acquire and systems are confronted with challenges when trying to classify such knowledge reliably.
In my talk I will give an overview of where and how common sense knowledge is expected to improve computational Natural Language Understanding. I will present ongoing work that assesses the difficulty of classifying common sense knowledge with different classification methods. I will close with recent studies we are conducting that target the integration of common sense knowledge in NLP applications.
Lecture 4: Voice beyond Parameters
Julie Anne Legate (University of Pennsylvania
Friday March 9, 10:15-11:15