Course syllabus

LT2813/LT2213 Spring 2024 Computational Semantics, Komputationell semantik, 7.5 credits, part of Master's Programme in Language Technology (MLT),  Applied Data Science Programme (N2ADS) and as a free-standing course.

Summary

In this course we will discuss ways of representing meaning of words, sentences and conversations with computational methods, both top-down rule-based representations and data-driven representations learned by machine learning. We will contrast them with each other, examine how we can draw inferences or reason with them computationally, and how can they be applied in different language technology tasks and applications.

Some topics that we will discuss are:

• rule-based representations in (formal) model theoretical semantics for natural language (as developed for example in Montague semantics);
• distributional representations in vector space models estimated from word distributions in texts;
• distributed representations such as word embeddings, language models and contextual word embeddings;
• semantic similarity, linguistic underspecification, compositionality, and reasoning in natural language;
• and others.

Course syllabi: (i) H2MLT and N2ADS: en , sv ; (ii) free-standing course: en, sv; (iii) PhD course: en.

Teachers

In the order of appearance... You can contact the lecturers by following the information on their webpages or you can send them a message through Canvas.

• Simon Dobnik (SD) (course organiser, office hours Thursdays 15:00-16:00 on Zoom
• Bill Noble (BN)
• Ricardo Muñoz Sánchez (RMS)
• Nikolai Ilinykh (NI)

Practical information

• Prerequisites and requirements to pass this course
• If you are taking this course as a free-standing course online
• Madelaine Miller (education coordinator)
• flov@flov.gu.se (education administration)

Course resources

• Slides, readings, and materials can be found under Modules
• Online classroomfor lectures, classes and seminars
• A reading list for the course
• Course materials on mltgpu.flov.gu..se: /srv/data/computational-semantics
• The previous edition of this course and the results of its evaluation survey
• Related coursefor doctoral students

Location and schedule

The course will start on 21 March 2023 in J440 and online. We will then meet (with a couple of exceptions) every Thursday (for seminars or assignment classes) and on every other Monday (for lectures) at 13:15. For a room booking schedule see here.

All events start with an academic quarter.