Conference Information

Full Title:	Towards a Formal Distributional Semantics

Short Title:	IWCS-TFDS2013
Location:	Potsdam, Germany
Start Date:	19-Mar-2013 - 19-Mar-2013
Contact:	Roberto Zamparelli
Meeting Email:	click here to access email
Meeting URL:	http://clic.cimec.unitn.it/roberto/IWCS-TFDS2013/
Meeting Description:	Over the last 50 years, model-theoretic semantics has made great progress in formalising various phenomena of human language, especially those related to the compositionality of meaning. It has also left some aspects largely unexamined: in particular, those concerned with the meaning of content words, which have been the concern of lexical semantics. Distributional or vector-space models of meaning, in turn, successfully model many lexical semantic phenomena, but, despite recent efforts, still do not account for compositionality or the role of function words. This workshop aims to foster the integration of formal and distributional semantics, building on their complementary strengths to produce better models of meaning in natural language. Its focus is on giving formal semantics a better handle on lexical semantics, while still preserving the aspects that have made it useful: for instance, the tight syntax-semantics interface for phenomena such as quantification, scope, modification and semantic roles, the notions of truth and extension, and the modeling of inference, at the level of both lexical items and propositions. Beyond the goal of better embedding lexical information in formal semantic representations, we encourage the investigation of the probabilistic aspects of distributional models in order to handle cases where truth theory falters (e.g., truth of generic statements). More generally, the workshop is open to new ideas about aspects of meaning beyond the level of truth values, and on how distributional semantics may contribute to the notion of intension. See the web site for additional information.
Linguistic Subfield:	Computational Linguistics; Semantics; Text/Corpus Linguistics
LL Issue:	23.3815


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