Courses And Workshops

Language and Computation (LaCo)

as list

Hands-on Distributional Semantics – From first steps to interdisciplinary applications
Stefan Evert, Gabriella Lapesa

Distributional semantic models (DSM) are based on the assumption that the meaning of a word can (at least to a certain extent) be inferred from its usage, i.e. its distribution in text. Therefore,... read

week 3 Foundational

Information theory
Mathias Winther Madsen

Information theory is a branch of probability theory that investigates the fundamental limits on our ability to communicate reliably. By quantifying the concepts of uncertainty and information in ... read

week 1 Foundational

Embeddings in Natural Language Processing
Jose Camacho Collados, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar

Embeddings have been the dominating buzzword in 2010s for Natural Language Processing (NLP). Representing knowledge through a low-dimensional vector which is easily integrable in modern machine le... read

week 3 Introductory

Probabilistic Language Understanding
Gregory Scontras

Recent advances in computational cognitive science (i.e., simulation-based probabilistic programs) have paved the way for significant progress in formal, implementable models of pragmatics. Rather... read

week 2 Introductory

Probabilistic Semantics and Inference Under Uncertainty in Natural Language
Jean-Philippe Bernardy, Aleksandre Maskharashvili

An important aspect of human reasoning is to process underspecified information expressed in natural language (here, underspecified means that not enough information is available to make categoric... read

week 3 Introductory

Analyzing the Cognitive Plausibility of Deep Language Models
Lisa Beinborn, Nora Hollenstein, Willem Zuidema

Computational models of language serve as an increasingly popular tool to examine research hypotheses related to language processing. Representing language in a computationally processable way for... read

week 1 Advanced

Information Theory in Linguistics: Methods and Applications
Adina Williams, Ryan Cotterell, Richard Futrell

Since Shannon originally proposed his mathematical theory of communication in the middle of the 20th century, information theory has been an important way of viewing and investigating problems at ... read

week 2 Advanced

Workshop on Computing Semantics with Types, Frames and Related Structures
Stergios Chatzikyriakidis, Rainer Osswald

The goal of this workshop is to bring together people interested in structured representations of semantic information, especially from a computational perspective. In recent years, there has been... read

week 1 Workshop

Computational and Experimental Explanations in Semantics and Pragmatics
Shane Steinert-Threlkeld, Jakub Szymanik

The traditional methodology of natural language semantics has used tools largely drawn from mathematical logic to build models designed to predict native speaker judgments of entailment between se... read

week 3 Workshop

Annotation, Recognition and Evaluation of Actions II (AREA-II)
Ielka van der Sluis, James Pustejovsky

AREA II is the follow up on the first AREA meeting at LREC 2018.
There has recently been increased interest in modeling actions, as described by natural language expressions and gestures, and ... read

week 2 Workshop

Logic and Language (LoLa)

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Commitment-based pragmatics
Bart Geurts

The notion of commitment has a deep history in philosophy, but in recent years it has been gaining traction in other disciplines as well, including logic, linguistics, computer science, and psycho... read

week 1 Foundational

Introduction to natural language formal semantics
Philippe de Groote, Yoad Winter

This foundational course will serve as an introduction to the formal semantics of natural language, as introduced by Richard Montague, and subsequently developed by followers.

The course p... read

week 1 Foundational

The Computational Nature of Language
Thomas Graf

This foundational course is aimed at students with no prior background in linguistics and/or the theory of computation. We will explore the computational mechanisms that underpin phonology (the gr... read

week 1 Foundational

Unifying formulaic, geometric, and algebraic theories of semantics
Andras Kornai

We consider the three major approaches to semantics that can be distinguished by their formal apparatus: formulaic, geometric, and algebraic and argue that these are trunk, leg, and tail of the sa... read

week 2 Introductory

Theoretical and Methodological Approaches to Animal Semantics: a Super Linguistic Introduction
Patrick Georg Grosz, Mélissa Berthet

Animal linguistics investigates the linguistic (e.g., semantic and syntactic) properties of non-human animal communication systems, using a combined methodology from both linguistics and ethology.... read

week 2 Introductory

An opinionated guide to the language of opinion
Natasha Korotkova, Pranav Anand

Subjective language has attracted substantial attention in the recent literature in formal semantics and philosophy of language. Most current theories argue that Subjective Predicates (SPs; "fun",... read

week 1 Introductory

Additivity, scalarity and the interactions between them: Beyond 'also' and 'even'
Yael Greenberg, Carla Umbach

ADDITIVITY and SCALARITY, linguistically encoded by alternative-sensitive operators, are in principle independent of each other: There are additives which are not scalars (e.g. 'also' / 'too'), as... read

week 1 Introductory

The semantics of metaphor
Joost Zwarts

Metaphor is a pervasive factor in natural language, underlying the conscious creation of verbal images (e.g., brexit as a divorce), but also the flexibility of our most basic vocabulary (like prep... read

week 1 Introductory

The semantics and psycholinguistics of subjective predicates
Elsi Kaiser, Deniz Rudin

Predicates of personal taste (PPTs) like "tasty" and "fun" have prompted much discussion in semantics and philosophy: We can disagree about whether the chili is tasty without either of us being ob... read

week 1 Introductory

Dynamic inquisitive semantics
Jakub Dotlačil, Floris Roelofsen

This course brings together two important strands in the formal analysis of natural language meaning: dynamic semantics and inquisitive semantics. It develops an integrated logical framework, dyna... read

week 3 Advanced

Intensionalism and Propositionalism in Linguistic Semantics
Kristina Liefke, Ede Zimmermann

This course introduces two competing approaches to the semantics of intensional constructions, viz. intensionalism and propositionalism, that have recently come to the forefront of discussion in s... read

week 3 Advanced

Abstract Argumentation and Modal Logic
Davide Grossi, Carlo Proietti

This course provides an introduction to abstract argumentation and illustrates its points of contact with other formal disciplines such as game theory and, in particular, modal logic. After introd... read

week 2 Advanced

Advanced mereology for linguists
Lucas Champollion

This course develops a unified theory of cross-categorial similarities involving the count-mass, singular-plural, telic-atelic, and collective-distributive opposition, based on the notion of strat... read

week 1 Advanced

Approaches to implicature: Rational choice and/or exhaustification
Judith Degen, Benjamin Spector, Daniel Lassiter

We propose to organize a workshop which will bring together researchers interested in two prominent threads of work on implicature in natural language. The first is the rational choice approach as... read

week 3 Workshop

Experimental approaches to language universals in structure and meaning
Mora Maldonado, Alexander Martin, Jennifer Culbertson

What is the range of variation in human languages? Despite their apparent differences, natural languages seem to exhibit many profound similarities between them. These similarities, often referred... read

week 2 Workshop

Logic and Computation (LoCo)

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Foundations of query languages for graph databases
Pablo Barceló, Diego Figueira

In this course we survey results on querying graph-structured data. We put a focus on complexity, expressive power, and static analysis optimization and we present various general-purpose navigati... read

week 2 Introductory

Temporal Logics
Valentin Goranko

This course will introduce and discuss the most important types and systems of temporal logics, including instant-based logics of linear and branching time, interval-based temporal logics, hybrid ... read

week 1 Introductory

Introduction to Deontic Logic and Its Applications (Introductory course)
Réka Markovich, Leon van der Torre

The aim of the course is to provide an introduction to deontic logic from conceptual and formal points of view highlighting the basic notions and approaches from the viewpoint of prominent applica... read

week 1 Introductory

Actions, Blames, and Regrets
Pavel Naumov

Coalition logics and closely related STIT logics are widely studied formalisms for describing strategic power of agents and their coalitions. Recently, variations of these logics have been used to... read

week 2 Introductory

Semantics based proof-search methods for non-classical logics
Camillo Fiorentini

Proof theory for non-classical logics has been deeply investigated. Standard techniques to prove the completeness of a calculus are based on syntactic methods, mostly relying on cut-elimination. T... read

week 3 Introductory

Probabilistic methods in social choice
Eric Pacuit

This course will survey the use of probabilistic methods and computer simulations to study group decision making methods. The course will begin with an introduction to social choice theory (primar... read

week 3 Introductory

From Proof Nets to Combinatorial Proofs — A new approach to Hilbert’s 24th problem
Willem Heijltjes, Lutz Straßburger

Hilbert's 24th problem is the question of when two proofs are the same. The problem is as old as proof theory itself, but there is still no satisfactory solution. The main reason for this is the s... read

week 2 Advanced

Logic, Data, and Incomplete Information
Phokion Kolaitis

During the past fifty years, first-order logic and its variants have been successfully used as a database query language. In traditional applications, the data at hand are assumed to be unambiguou... read

week 1 Advanced

Symmetric Computation
Anuj Dawar, Gregory Wilsenach

The notion of a symmetric algorithm, i.e. one with an explicit combinatorial property that guarantees isomorphism-invariant computation, arises naturally in the context of database theory, finite ... read

week 3 Advanced

Logical foundations of categorization theory
Fei Liang, Alessandra Palmigiano

Categories are cognitive tools that humans use to organize their experience, understand and function in the world, and understand and interact with each other, by grouping things together which ca... read

week 1 Advanced

Lewis meets Brouwer: Constructive strict implication
Tadeusz Litak, Albert Visser

C. I. Lewis invented modern modal logic as a theory of "strict implication". Over the classical propositional calculus one can as well work with the unary box connective. Intuitionistically, howev... read

week 1 Advanced

Workshop on Logics of Dependence and Independence
Jouko Väänänen, Fan Yang

This is a workshop on "Logics of dependence and independence" consisting of a programme of invited and contributed talks. Logics of dependence and independence are novel non-classical logics aimin... read

week 3 Workshop

Workshop on automated synthesis
Natasha Alechina, Brian Logan

This workshop is in the area of logic and computation. It aims to bring together work on using logic, games and automata for automatically generating plans and strategies for AI agents. Topics inc... read

week 1 Workshop