This is a 3rd year course in the Bachelor Artificial Intelligence programme, open to advanced Bachelor's students (and interested Master's students) who want to learn more about logic and natural language processing.

This website gives general information about the course, as well as access to the slides used during the lectures. Other information, such as homework assignments, will be provided via UvA Blackboard.

Lecturer: Raquel Fernández (room C3.132, ILLC, University of Amsterdam)

Timetable: Two hours per week, Wednesdays 13-15h in G2.13 (period 4) / Tuesdays 15-17h in G0.05 (period 5). Some sessions may take place in a Computerpracticum room; the time and room number for these sessions will be announced in due time during the lectures.

Contents and Objectives: We will explore how Prolog can be used to provide semantic interpretations in natural language processing. We will start by reviewing how we can automatically associate logic-based semantic representations with sentences in natural language. After this brief introduction, the core of the course will deal with phenomena that go beyond the boundary of the sentence, that is, discourse phenomena, including pronoun resolution and presuppositions. We'll cover both the theory underlying these phenomena and their implementation in Prolog. Finally, we will go beyond the confines of one single agent to look into some issues related to dialogue modelling and dialogue management in dialogue systems. The overall objectives of the course are:

• Understanding the fundamental techniques behind logic-based computational semantics for processing natural language discourse and dialogue.
• Developing hands-on experience in automating such processing in Prolog.

Textbook:

• Blackburn & Bos (2005) Representation and Inference for Natural Language, A First Course in Computational Semantics, CSLI Publications.
  Material from selected chapters of this book will be covered with slides.
• Blackburn & Bos (draft), Working with Discourse Representation Theory, unpublished manuscript available online.

Resources: SWI Prolog, Prolog code from Blackburn & Bos (BB1 / BB2), Prover9 & Mace4

Slides: (to be updated throughout the semester)

• 01-introduction.pdf
• 02-model-checking.pdf
• 03-semantic-construction.pdf
• 04-inference.pdf
• 05-practicum1.pdf
• 06-curt-system.pdf
• 07-DRT.pdf
• 08-pronoun-resolution.pdf
• 09-ref-resolution.pdf
• 10-presupposition.pdf
• 11-practicum2.pdf
• 12-wrapup.pdf