Semantic Theory is a core course of the Master of
Science programme in Language
Science and Technology (LST), taught at the
department of Language Science and
Technology at Saarland University.
Content
This course focuses on the theoretical study of
natural language meaning, but will also address
practical applications. In the first part of the
course, we will study sentence-level (Montague)
semantics: starting out from first-order predicate
logic, moving to (typed) lambda calculus. In the
second part of the course, we zoom in to the level of
lexical semantics, in particular focusing on verbs
(event semantics) and quantified noun phrases
(generalized quantifiers). In the third part of the
course, we move to discourse-level semantics: we use
the framework of Discourse Representation Theory to
study discourse-level phenomena such as anaphora and
presupposition. In the final part of the course, we
discuss recent advances in semantic theory. In
particular, we will look at Distributional Formal
Semantics, which extends formal semantics with a
distributional component, providing compositional and
probabilistic meaning representations that are also
suitable for use in contemporary deep learning
approaches.
Details
Lecturers: Noortje Venhuizen
and Harm Brouwer
Email: [noortjev/brouwer] at
coli.uni-saarland dot de
Time: Tuesday and
Thursday 10:15-11:45
Place: Online (Microsoft Teams)
Start date: 15.04.2021
Format and Requirements:
- The course will be taught online with a strong
focus on self-study;
- Slides and suggested reading materials will be
made available each week, and lecture sessions will
serve to discuss these in an interactive Q&A
style manner;
- Exercise sheets will be made available after
each lecture, and are due before the next lecture
slot. During the exercise sessions, we will discuss
questions about open exercises, and solutions to
completed exercises in a Q&A syle manner;
- There will be an exam at the end of the
semester (22.07.2021). Your grade for this exam
will be your grade for the course;
- To be admitted to the final exam, you may skip
or fail at most one weekly exercise;
- We strongly encourage active participation
during all lectures and exercise sessions.
Prerequisites:
Familiarity with first-order predicate logic.
Specifically, we expect you to be familiar with the
content described in the first two sections of this
chapter: Logic in
Action, Chapter 4 (Sections 4.1 & 4.2).
Registration: To
register for this course, please send an email to
noortjev at coli.uni-saarland dot de
.
Registration through LSF is not necessary.
Literature
We will provide weekly reading material for each
topic, which will be updated throughout the semester.
Some important online resources:
Schedule
Note that this is a preliminary schedule, which
may change during the course of the semester. All
course materials (slides, reading material,
exercises) will be made available through Teams.
Week 0
April 13:
Orientation Meeting
April 15: Course introduction
Week 1
Reading Material:
Logic
in Action, Chapter 4 (Sec 4.5 & 4.6), Elements
of Formal Semantics (Chapter 2)
April 20: Predicate
Logic
April 22: Exercise session 1
Week 2
Reading material:
Elements
of Formal Semantics (Chapter 3: Part 1 & 2)
April 27: Type
Theory
April 29: Exercise session 2
Week 3
Reading material:
Elements
of Formal Semantics (Chapter 3: Part 3)
May 4: Lambda
Calculus
May 6: Exercise session 3
Week 4
May 11: TBA
May 13: No class (Christi
Himmelfahrt)
Week 5
Reading material:
Lasersohn (2012): Event-Based Semantics
May 18: Event
Semantics
May 20: Exercise session 4
Week 6
Reading material:
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Generalized
Quantifiers (Sec 1-5, 10, 13)
May 25: Generalized
Quantifiers
May 27: Exercise session 5
Week 7
June 1: Dynamic
Semantics
June 3: No class (Fronleichnam)
Week 8
Reading material:
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Discourse
Representation Theory (Sec 1-4)
June 8: Discourse
Representation Theory
June 10: Exercise session 6
Week 9
Reading material:
Van der Sandt (1992): Presupposition projection as
anaphora resolution.
June 15:
Presupposition
June 17: Exercise session 7
Week 10
Reading material:
Venhuizen,
Hendriks, Crocker, Brouwer (2021). Distributional
Formal Semantics
June 22:
Distributional Formal Semantics
June 24: Exercise session 8
Week 11
June 29: TBA
July 1: TBA
Week 12
July 6: Current
Issues in Semantic Theory
July 8: Exam Q&A
Week 13
July 13: no
class
July 15: no class
Exam Week (July 19 - 23)
July 22: Exam
(starts at 10 AM sharp!)