Course level Intermediate

Course Overview Computational semantics is the art and science of computing meanings for the expressions of natural language. Meaning is a relation between linguistic expressions and the structures in the world outside language. Denotational meaning boils down to knowledge of the conditions for truth in situations, while operational meaning can be viewed as instruction for performing cognitive action.

The course will demonstrate how semantic representations can be constructed and how such representations can be used for inference tasks. We will illustrate all this by means of implementations in the functional programming language Haskell.

No experience with programming is presupposed. Students are advised to bring their laptops, so that they can get hands on experience with the implementations.

Course from day to day

• Monday: An inference engine with a natural language interface (Jan).
  • Intro to Computational Semantics slides: WICS.pdf
  • Intro to Functional Programming slides: GSWH.pdf
  • Exercises to get started: Exercises1.pdf
  • Inference Engine slides: IENL.pdf
• Tuesday: Sets, types and functions (Christina)
  • Sets, types and functions slides: sets.pdf
• Wednesday: Typed meanings for natural language (Jan)
  • Form and Content slides: FormContent.pdf
  • Logic slides: Logic.pdf
  • Some further exercises: Exercises2.pdf
  • Haskell file with solutions to the exercises: bmi.hs
  • Latex source file of Logic slides: Logic.tex
• Thursday: Parsing and interpretation (Christina)
  • Parsing slides: parsing.pdf.
• Friday: Knowledge and Communication (Jan)

Haskell source files

• Monday: GSWH.hs, InfEngine.hs kb.txt
• Tuesday: Model.hs, Relations.hs,
• Wednesday: FormContent.hs, Logic.hs.
• Thursday: Argh.hs, Parsing.hs.
• Friday: will appear here.

Reading material for the course

• L.T.F. Gamut, Logic, Language and Meaning, Volume 1 The University of Chicago Press, 1991
• Jan van Eijck and Christina Unger, Computational Semantics with Functional Programming, CUP, to appear). Draft version available here.

If you want hands on experience, please bring your laptop.

Useful links

• The Haskell Homepage.
• The Hugs Haskell Interpreter.
• The GHC Haskell Interpreter and Compiler.