Comparative Computational Semantics

In collaboration with Stanford University and the University of Washington, the WeSearch project at the University of Oslo holds a three-day, by-invitation working meeting from November 13 to 15, 2014, in Berlin. The meeting will be hosted at Arcotel Velvet, not far away from Bahnhof Friedrichstraße, which is easily accessible from both airports.

A few photos of our lovely setting.

Materials

Participants have been asked to prepare candidate analyses (or general, high-level reflections) for a selection of some sixty minimal exemplars, instantiating ten broad semantic phenomena. The following representations are currently available for comparison:

Alex Lascarides has contributed a set of high-level reflections, relating compositional sentence semantics and desiderata originating in discourse-level analysis. There is still room for additional target representations, reflections, or pointers to relevant literature.

Schedule

The meeting starts at 10:00 (‘after breakfast’) on Thursday, November 13, and we will wrap up around 16:00 on Saturday, November 15. The plan is to use the first session to ‘jump right in’, i.e. familiarize ourselves with the various representations and discuss design choices for a specific phenomenon, control relations (which we believe to be relatively well-understood and comparatively uncontroversial).

Reflecting on this first joint calibration session, we plan on a brief high-level discussion after lunch, to exchange views about, for example, our specific goals in different approaches to meaning representation (and composition), known or anticipated commonalities and differences, notions of standing (or sentence) vs. occassion (or speaker) meaning, the role of grammar, or which sub-tasks to differentiate in semantic analysis (like, for example, predicate–argument analysis, sense disambiguation, named entity classification, resolving scope ambiguities, and coreference resolution).

To prepare for an afternoon coffee break, we will not let theoretical arguments get out of hand and start discussing a second phenomenon in that same session. From there on, the meeting agenda is largely up to collective decision making, but we shall try to get through in-depth discussion of at least six of the phenomena on our shopping list.

   
Thursday, November 13  
10:00–12:30 Control Relations (Calibration)
12:30–13:30 Lunch
13:30–14:30 High-Level Goals
14:30–15:30 Clausal Complements
15:30–16:00 Coffee
16:00–18:00 Clausal Complements
Friday, November 14  
09:00–10:30 Third Phenomenon
10:30–11:00 Coffee
11:00–12:30 Third Phenomenon
12:30–13:30 Lunch
13:30–15:30 Fourth Phenomenon
15:30–16:00 Coffee
16:00–17:30 Fourth Phenomenon
19:30 Joint Dinner
Saturday, November 15  
09:00–10:30 Fifth Phenomenon
10:30–11:00 Coffee
11:00–12:30 Fifth Phenomenon
12:30–13:30 Lunch
13:30–15:30 Sixth Phenomenon
15:30–16:00 Collective Wrap-Up

All scheduled sessions will meet in Business Suite 616 on the top floor of the hotel. Coffee breaks are not served at the hotel, but there are at least two decent coffee shops in the immediate neighborhood.

Notes

Thanks to Emily, there are transcripts from the sessions; please feel free to extend or correct the record as you see fit. To do so, you will need to register to the wiki using the exact user name listed on the CcsGroup page. For those who do not have DELPH-IN wiki accounts from before, please create an account for yourself (following the naming conventions prescribed on the CcsGroup page). You should have received the secret textcha required for account creation in email.

Participants

  • Emily M. Bender, University of Washington (Wednesday to Monday)
  • Johan Bos, University of Groningen (Wednesday to Saturday)
  • Silvie Cinkova, Charles University of Prague (Wednesday to Sunday)
  • Cleo Condoravdi, Stanford University
  • Ann Copestake, University of Cambridge (Wednesday to Saturday)
  • Dick Crouch, Nuance Communications (Wednesday to Sunday)
  • Dan Flickinger, Stanford University (Wednesday to Monday)
  • Jan Hajič, Charles University of Prague (Saturday)
  • Alexander Koller, Potsdam University
  • Alex Lascarides, University of Edinburgh (Wednesday to Sunday)
  • Stephan Oepen, University of Oslo (Wednesday to Sunday)
  • Martha Palmer, University of Colorado Boulder
  • Tim O’Gorman, University of Colorado Boulder (Wednesday to Saturday)
  • Woodley Packard, University of Washington (Wednesday to Monday)

Financial Support

The project has available funds by the Norwegian Research council to cover (the bulk of) expenses related to participation in the meeting, viz.

  • travel costs, up to EUR 300 or EUR 800 for European or US participants, respectively;
  • up to four overnight stays at the conference hotel (not including breakfast);
  • lunches during the three days of the working meeting (Thursday to Saturday);
  • a joint dinner for all participants, on Friday evening (November 14).

Participants are asked to make their own travel arrangements and email their arrival and departure times to StephanOepen, who will make hotel reservations. Please keep receipts and (if applicable) boarding passes, which you will have to submit for reimbursement to the University of Oslo after completion of your travels. With a bit of luck, reimbursements should be processed by mid-December.

To request reimbursement, UiO will need your date of birth, home address, and bank information. In addition to the form, please mail receipt(s) for travel expenses to the address below. In case of electronic tickets and receipts, please include a boarding pass stub or similar, i.e. something that can be interpreted as an ‘original’ document.

  • Stephan Oepen, University of Oslo, Department of Informatics, Boks 1080 Blindern, 0317 Oslo

Last update: 2014-11-20 by EmilyBender [edit]