Computational Semantics and Pragmatics

MSc Logic / MSc AI :: 1st semester (block 1) 2014

Lecturer: Raquel Fernández (Institute for Logic, Language and Computation)
Teaching assistant: Julian Schlöder
Timetable: Tuesdays and Thursday 11-13h; for the room, see https://rooster.uva.nl

Overview: This year the course will be dedicated to dialogue modelling (to models of language as it is used in actual conversation). This website will be updated throughout the course with the contents of each session. This information may be tentative and it is subject to change. Please check this website regularly.

Prerequisites: There are no formal prerequisites, but I'll assume some basic knowledge of semantics/pragmatics of natural language. Basic programming skills are useful.

Evaluation: The course will consist of lectures and discussions of research papers; everybody is expected to play an active role in class. You will be asked to write a short paper by the end of the course (the last couple of weeks will be dedicated to this). This paper will account for most of the final grade (around 70%). The rest will correspond to exercises and class discussions.

04 Sep

Brief overview of the course and introduction to turn taking [slides].
Some references with overviews of the field (I recommend you to read at least one of them):

The LanguageLog, a fascinating source of information. You can find posts on turn taking here and here (with a follow-up post). There might be more.

To do:

  1. Read one of the following research papers before the next class. Pay attention to the following aspects: What is the main aim of the work reported in the paper? Which methodology has been used? What are the results? How is the paper structured? Take note of aspects you don't understand (you are not expected to understand everything).
  2. Transcription exercise (not graded; hand in a print out on Thursday 11 Sept at the beginning of the class).
    Record (or find online) a spoken two-party conversation and transcribe around 2 minutes of it (3 pages max). In this document you will find transcription conventions and a couple of sample transcriptions. You don't need to use all the transcription conventions listed here. Pay special attention to conventions that can help to chracterise the turn taking behaviour of the participants. At the end of the document there are some suggested "activities" which you can take as the starting point for analysing turn taking in your own transcription. You need to hand it one file including:
    • some information on the context of the conversation (gender/age/social relationship of the participants, activity they are engaged in, topic of the convesation... whatever seems relevant)
    • the transcirption itself (make sure you use Courier font for this)
    • a brief summary of your observations regarding turn taking with examples when appropriate (this can be a bullet point list and it shouldn't be longer than one page).

09 Sep

Discussion of some research papers on turn taking (see reference above).

11 Sep

Speech acts / dialogue acts. [slides].

To do:

16 Sep

Comments on transcription exercise, by Julian. [slides]
Joint Action model / grounding. [slides]

Recommended readings:

18 Sep

Raquel is away. More on grounding, by Julian. [slides]

23 Sep

Homework #1 due.
Preparation for annotation exercise [annotation guidelines]

Inter-annotator agreement. [slides]

To do: You will get the items to be annotated from Julian. Submit your annotation as soon as possible, at the latest by Tuesday 30 Sep before class. Once you have recived an annotation by a fellow student, try to calcualte inter-annotator agreement and examine the (dis)agreement patters.

25 Sep

This session is cancelled. I recommend you to use it to do the annotation exercise. See also the readings for next week.

30 Sep

Convergence / alignment [slides]

To do:

02 Oct

Discussion of a research paper on alignment (see above).
Discussion of the results of the annotation exercise.

To do: Read the first chapter of The Interactive Stance: Meaning for Conversation by Jonathan Ginzburg.

07 Oct

Dynamic semantics for dialogue. [slides]

To do: Propose a project topic by Thursday 9 Oct (talk to me in class or send me an email).

09 Oct

Dynamic semantics for dialogue: grounding, clarification and speech disfluencies. [slides]

Recommended reading related to speech disfluencies: a saga of recent Language Log posts on filled pauses with a lot of interesting anlyses and results.

14 & 16 Oct

Individual supervision meetings to discuss ongoing project work (in my office at the ILLC, room F1.07 in SP 107; entrance through Nikhef at SP 105).

Bring the current draft of your paper to the meeting, even if it is very sketchy.

21 & 23 Oct

Presentations of final papers. Location: ILLC Seminar room F1.15 (opposite my office at SP 107).

Prepare a presentation of at most 15 minutes to leave time for questions and discussion.


Guidelines for Final Projects

Final presentation Final paper [ due on Sunday 26 Oct midnight ]