Course Details
Time: Tuesday 9:10-10:30 am and Thursday* 3:30-5:30 pm
Location: Volen 106, *Volen 105
Professor: James Pustejovsky
258 Volen Center
E-mail
Office Hours: MW 10:30-12:00
Teaching Assistant: Amber Stubbs
110 Volen Center
E-mail
Office Hours: T 11-12:30, TH, 12:30-2:00, or by appointment
Course Description
This is a course for advanced undergraduate students and first-year graduate students, which focuses on the computational treatment of core semantic phenomena in language. Topics covered will include a preliminary formal introduction including first-order logic, lambda-calculus, and compositionality. Additionally, we will address these topics:
A. Questions, including the semantics of questions, question-answer systems, dialogue and discourse, selection of variables, inference in language, summarization, entailment issues, and commonsense knowledge;
B. Meaning Update and Revision, including pragmatics and updates;
C. Computational Lexical Semantics.
For each core topic, we will initially discuss the relevant facts and approaches from theoretical linguistics, and will then explore the issues which arise for a computational system, including representations and algorithms. Assignments for the course will be done in Prolog.
Textbook
This course will be using Patrick Blackburn and Johan Bos’ Representation and Inference for Natural Language: A First Course in Computational Semantics. The book will be available in class on Thursday.
Grading Information
Your grade for this class is based on several problem sets, a midterm exam, a final project, and class participation. The breakdown is as follows:
Problem Sets (6) - 50%
Mid-term Exam - 15%
Final Project - 25%
Class Participation - 10%
Late Policy: Problem sets are due at the beginning of class unless otherwise stated. For each day your assignment is late, you will lose 5%. No extensions will be granted on the due date without a documented reason.
Course Information
Throughout the semester, we will use this website to make any course announcements, so please check in frequently. There is also a latte page for this course that you can access by logging in at http://latte.brandeis.edu/. You must be officially registered for the course in order to access the latte page. Course readings and Handouts will be posted through latte.
Last Updated: Jan 29, 2009