Computer Laboratory

Course pages 2014–15

Language and Concepts

Reading list

Note that URLs are given for readings, but in some cases these will require login via a Raven password. Some of the additional material is only available in books, all of which are available in the University Library. Please contact the module leader if there are any difficulties with access to material. Additional material: further reading for topics covered in the session. Intended to be useful for essays or to provide more background.
  • Session 1: Introduction. Overview of concepts and discussion of the objectives of the module.

    Required reading:
    Concepts Margolis, Eric and Laurence, Stephen, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2011 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), (HTML)

    Session 2: Deep learning and functions of concepts. Socher and Manning, slides for NAACL 2013

  • Possible readings

    Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch

    Previous Readings

    Introduction to WordNet: An On-line Lexical Database. George A. Miller, Richard Beckwith, Christiane Fellbaum, Derek Gross, and Katherine Miller. 1993. (pdf)

    Nouns in WordNet: A Lexical Inheritance System. George A. Miller. 1993. (pdf)

    Acquiring Ontological Relationships from Wikipedia using RMRS. Herbelot, A. and Copestake, A. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Web content Mining with Human Language Technologies, 2006, ISWC'06. (pdf)
    There are a large number of papers on ontology extraction --- I have listed this one because it is based on an MPhil project done in the Computer Laboratory. Description Logics as Ontology Languages for the Semantic Web Franz Baader, Ian Horrocks and Ulrike Sattler (pdf)
    Understanding of the full formal details won't be necessary. Using OWL to model biological knowledge. Robert Stevens, Mikel Egaña Aranguren, Katy Wolstencroft, Ulrike Sattler, Nick Drummond, Matthew Horridge, Alan Rector. Int. J. Human-Computer Studies 65 (2007) 583-594. (pdf)
    Understanding the biology won't be necessary! The Semantic Web Revisited. Shadbolt, N.; Hall, W.; Berners-Lee, T.; , Intelligent Systems, IEEE , vol.21, no.3, pp.96-101, Jan.-Feb. 2006 doi: 10.1109/MIS.2006.62. (pdf) Guidelines on Developing Good Ontologies in the Biomedial Domain with Description Logics Schulz et al 2012. (pdf) Learning words for kinds: Generic noun phrases in acquisition.
    Susan A. Gelman
    In Weaving a lexicon (2004): 445-484. (pdf)

    Semantics, conceptual spaces and the meeting of minds
    M. Warglien & P. Gärdenfors (2005) (pdf)

    Vector space models of lexical meaning Stephen Clark. 2012

    Nastase, Vivi, and Michael Strube. "Transforming Wikipedia into a large scale multilingual concept network." Artificial Intelligence (2013).
    (pdf)


    Hovy, Eduard, Roberto Navigli, and Simone Paolo Ponzetto. "Collaboratively built semi-structured content and Artificial Intelligence: The story so far." Artificial Intelligence (2013). (pdf)

    Andrews, Mark, Gabriella Vigliocco, and David Vinson. "Integrating experiential and distributional data to learn semantic representations." Psychological review 116.3 (2009): 463. (pdf)

    Bootstrapping and the Origin of Concepts. Susan Carey. Daedalus. Vol. 133, No. 1, On Learning (Winter, 2004), pp. 59-68. Published by: The MIT Press on behalf of American Academy of Arts & Sciences (pdf)
    Piantadosi, Steven T., Joshua B. Tenenbaum, and Noah D. Goodman. "Modeling the acquisition of quantifier semantics: a case study in function word learnability." Under review (2013). (pdf)

    Background reading:
    Notes on generalised quantifiers. (pdf)

    Required reading:
    Pulvermüller, Friedemann. "How neurons make meaning: brain mechanisms for embodied and abstract-symbolic semantics." Trends in cognitive sciences 17.9 (2013): 458-470. (pdf)

    Lenci, Alessandro, et al. "BLIND: a set of semantic feature norms from the congenitally blind." Behavior research methods 45.4 (2013): 1218-1233. (pdf)

    David M. Blei, Communications of the ACM CACM, Volume 55 Issue 4, April 2012, Pages 77-84 (pdf)

    Levinson, Stephen C. "Language and space." Annual review of Anthropology (1996): 353-382. (pdf)

    Van Deemter, Kees. "Generating referring expressions that involve gradable properties." Computational Linguistics 32.2 (2006): 195-222. (pdf)