Course pages 2011–12

Word Meaning and Discourse Understanding

Session 1: 7/10/2011. Background to lexical semantics and word senses. Handout. Coursework 1.

Reading:

• Cruse, chapter 6 (sense ambiguity tests)
• Cruse, chapter 3 (anomaly, semantic traits)
• Cruse, chapter 2 and 5 for terminology and some core concepts

Session 2: 14/10/2011. Word sense disambiguation (WSD) algorithms. Handout.

Reading:

• Jurasfky and Martin, chapter 20.1-20.4.
• Navigli and Lapata (2010)
• Barzilay and Elhadad (1997).

Session 3: 21/10/2011. Semantic Spaces and Semantic Similarity. Handout.

Reading:

• Jurafsky and Martin, 20.7 (semantic spaces) and 23.1.1 and 23.1.2 (Vector Space Model).
• Manning, Raghavan, Schuetze (Introduction to Information Retrieval), Chapter 18 (LSI).
• Schütze (1998)
• Lin (1998)
• Pado and Lapata (2007)
• Griffiths, Steyvers, Tenenbaum (2007)

Session 4: 28/10/2011. The Semantics of Verbs. Handout. Selectional Restrictions, subcategorisation and thematic roles. FrameNet. Coursework 2.

Reading:

• Jurafsky and Martin, chapter 19.4
• Sun and Korhonen (2009)
• Gildea and Jurafsky (2002).
• Fillmore and Atkins (1992) Towards a Frame-Based Lexicon: The Semantics of RISK and its neighbors.

Session 5: 4/11/2011. Figurative Language and Sentiment. Handout.

Reading:

• Lapata and Lascarides (2003)
• Markert and Nissim (2002)
• Shutova et al. (2010).
• Cruse (1986), Lexical Semantics. Chapters 9 and 11.3
• Hatzivassiloglou and and McKeown (1997)
• Turney (2002).

Session 6: 11/11/2011. Coherence in Text. Handout. Coursework 3.

Reading:

• Hearst (1997)
• Reynar (1994)
• Barzilay and Lapata (2005)

Session 7: 18/11/2011. Coreference and Anaphora Resolution. Handout.

Reading:

• Jurafsky and Martin, ch. 21.3-21.8.
• Hobbs (1976)
• Grosz et al (1995)

Session 8: 25/11/2011. Discourse Models. Handout. Scanned List of RST Relations here

Reading:

• Jurafsky and Martin, ch. 21.5 (RST)
• Grosz and Sidner (1986)
• Teufel and Moens (2002)