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Courses and Workshops
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Description This course will explore some of the formal semantics literature
on vagueness, juxtapose it with experimental results, and ask what
it would take for an NLP program to behave in a natural way
(e.g., to pass the Turing test) with respect to its treatment of
vagueness. A number of language-generating programs will be discussed
and, if time allows, some language-interpreting ones as well.
Approximate schedule:
* Lecture 1. Introductory lecture
o Sources of vagueness
o Relevance for NLP/AI
o Vagueness, underspecification, ambiguity
o Some experimental evidence
* Lecture 2. Formal issues (I):
o Context-dependence
o Inference involving vague expressions
* Lecture 3. Formal issues (II):
o Sorites paradox
* Lecture 4. Computational applications (I)
o Generation of vague expressions
* Lecture 5. Computational applications (II)
o Interpretation of vague expressions
References (contained in Reader):
- Goyal and Shoham (1993). ``Reasoning Precisely with Vague
Concepts''. In Procs. of AAAI Conference, Washington 1993.
- Dominic Hyde (2002). ``Sorites Paradox''. The Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2002 Edition), Edward Zalta (Ed.)
Also downloadable from
http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2002/entries/sorites-paradox/
- Kyburg and Morreau (2000). M. Morreau and A. Kyburg,
``Fitting Words: Vague Language in Context''. Linguistics
and Philosophy 23:577-597.
- Stone and DeVault (2004). ``Interpreting Vague Utterances in
Context''. To appear in Procs. of COLING 2004, Geneva.
- van Deemter (1992). ``The Role of Ambiguity in the Sorites
Fallacy''. In: P.Dekker and M.Stokhoff (Eds.), In Procs. of 9th
Amsterdam Colloquium, pp.209-227, Amsterdam.
- van Deemter (2000). ``Generating Vague Descriptions'', In
Procs. of First International Conference on Natural Language
Generation (INLG-2000), Mitzpe Ramon.
- van Deemter (2004). ``Finetuning an NLG System through
Experiments with Human Subjects: the Case of Vague
Descriptions''. In Procs. of 3rd International Conference
on Natural Language Generation (INLG-04).
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© 2003, 2004 LORIA, Carlos Areces. |
2004-07-05
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