Computational Semantics Information

This page attempts to collect some basic information, online and otherwise, for computational semantics. It was prompted by a query for information which Barbara Partee sent out to a number of people. The responses as well as some additional information were put together by Kyle Rawlins. If you have any comments or additions (or deletions) that you would like to see here, please contact him at krawlins at ucsc dot edu.

This page does not suppose to be a complete list of all the material available. Ideally, though, this would be a decent place for someone to start who wished to learn about computational semantics.

Contents

1. What is Computational Semantics?
2. Books, Specific and General
3. Papers (mostly empty)
4. Workshops and SIGs
5. Websites
6. Courses (with information online)

What is computational semantics?

Several people have tried to answer this; here are a few that I know about:

• Matthew Stone has an interesting page which attempts to answer this question.
• The intro to the oft-mentioned Blackburn and Bos book (see below) does a good job.
• Patrick Blackburn has section titled About Computational Semantics on his homepage
• I'm sure some other people have comments on their web sites, but google hasn't helped me any more in this; any comments appreciated.
• One way of getting at this question is to look at calls for papers, even though these may be oriented towards people who already know some answer. Here is an excerpt from the CFP for IWCS4 (more information on conferences below):

  Topics of interest for the workshop will be computational aspects of formal semantic theories as well as theoretical issues in building natural language understanding systems, including systems where language is used in a multimedia setting.

  Here is an excerpt from ICoS-3 CFP:

  Traditional inference tools (such as theorem provers and model builders) are reaching new levels of sophistication and are now widely and easily available. A wide variety of new tools (statistical and probabilistic methods, ideas from the machine learning community) are likely to be increasingly applied in computational semantics. Most importantly of all, computational semantics seems to have reached the stage where the exploration and development of inference is one of its most pressing tasks - and there's a lot of interesting new work which takes inferential issues seriously.

Books (specific and general)

• (online) Patrick Blackburn and Johan Bos, Representation and Inference for a Natural Language, www.blackburnbos.org (this used to be www.comsem.org but that domain got grabbed - thanks to Johan Bos for alerting me to this). At this address is also a second book titled Working with Discourse Representation Theory. (Suggested by several people: Reinhard Muskens, Per Anker Jensen, Mark Steedman, and Hans Kamp). It should be noted that this is a draft form which is reportedly undergoing heavy revision. The book includes code in prolog that is supposed to be very nice to work with.

  Additionally, several of the people who recommended this pointed out that it presupposes knowledge of Prolog - and pointed to the online book by the same authors + Kristina Striegnitz, which can be found here. Also for learning prolog, Reinhard Muskens suggested: Ivan Bratko, Prolog Programming for Artificial Intelligence, Addison-Wesley, 1986 (3rd edition 2000).

• (online) Gazdar and Mellish, Natural Language Processing in Prolog, Addison-Wesley, 1989. (suggested by Reinhard Muskens, as a general text, though he points at that it is out of print. There is an online version minus the figures at this location. Since this text is in prolog it may also be helpful towards working with the Blackburn and Bos book.)
• Carpenter, Bob, Type-Logical Semantics, MIT Press, 1998. There is more information here.
• K.-U. Carstensen, Ch. Ebert, C. Endriss, S. Jekat, R. Klabunde and H. Langer (eds.), Computerlinguistik und Sprachtechnologie, Spektrum: Heidelberg, Berlin, 2001. This book is in German, and has a chapter on semantics. (Suggested by Hans Kamp)
• Manning and Schütze, Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing, MIT Press, 1999. (the standard textbook for many NLP courses)
• Grosz, Sparck-Jones, and Webber, Readings in Natural Language Processing, San Mateo, CA: Morgan Kaufmann, 1996. (suggested by Mark Steedman)
• (online) Pereira and Shieber, Prolog and natural language analysis, C S L I Publications, 1987. This book is online for noncommercial usage. (suggested by Mark Steedman)
• James Allen, Natural Language Understanding (2nd ed), Benjamin Cummings, 1994. (suggested by Reinhard Muskens and Mark Steedman, as a general text)
• Jurafsky and Martin, Speech and Language Processing, Prentice Hall, 2002. (has a short chapter on semantics)

Papers

Please recommend papers to me!

The Association for Computational Linguistics is putting many papers online. This includes back issues of Computational Linguistics, as well as various conference proceedings. CoLing articles go all the way back to 1965, and ACL proceedings to 1979! There is a lot of good stuff in here, some of it related to computational semantics.

For recent work, try the proceedings of various workshops below. Most recently, I notice that ICoS-4 has papers online, and so does DiaBruck 2003.

Workshops and SIGs

• ACL has a Special Interest Group on Computational Semantics (SIGSEM). (suggested by Mark Steedman). Both of the below workshops were endorsed by SIGSEM, and SIGSEM has a page with previous and upcoming events, here.
• There is a workshop on the semantics and pragmatics of dialogue (DiaBruck), the topics for which are at the intersection of semantics and computational linguistics. The website for the 7th of these, in 2003, has papers available.
• CFP One upcoming workshop is Computational Lexical Semantics 2004, in conjunction with HLT/NAACL. The paper submission deadline is Jan. 16.
• IWCS stands for the International Workshop in Computational Semantics. There have so far been five, of which the four most recent had web pages. Unfortunately, the pages for 2 and 3 have vanished. I leave the links in in case they show up: 2 (dead link), 3 (dead link), 4, 5. There is also the main web page for IWCS. (This is not to be confused with the International Wire and Cable Symposium.)
• ICoS, ICoS-2, ICoS-3, and ICoS-4, were workshops that took place in 1999, 2000, and 2001, and 2003 respectively. The acronym expansion is Inference in Computational Semantics. The first of those links seems to be the homepage for the whole workshop, and has links to some of the proceedings, which are available online. The program for ICoS-4 also has papers linked.
• Eurolan 2003 was a summer school on the semantic web and language technology.

Web sites

• The Blackburn and Bos books are web sites as well as books.
• SIGSEM has a good list of resources here , including projects (some of which seem to be current), systems, inference engines, relevent journals, and a few other things.
• There are some grammars that are worth knowing about. One of the more well known ones is Head driven Phrase Structure Grammar. A group (presumably among some others) that does work in HPSG with relevence to computational semantics is the LinGO group at Stanford. There's also quite a bit more HPSG work online. (suggested by Bob Carpenter)
• A set of links from the university of Edinburgh. Last updated 1997. This was part of the FraCaS project. FraCaS "aimed at bringing about a convergence of current efforts in computational semantics". There were a number of papers and collections of information resulting from this which are available.
• The sequel to FraCaS is TRINDI, or Task oRiented INstructional Dialogue. They also have produced a number of publications. (suggested by Hans Kamp)
• James Isaacs and Chris Potts are working on formalizing the content and use of imperatives. One product of this is the Speech Acts Game which attempts to simulate discourses involving imperatives, using a dynamic logic based on Groenendijk's (1999) Logic of Interrogation.
• Bob Carpenter has a theorem prover for Type Logic Grammars.
• Searching the Linguist List gives a variety of links about computational semantics.
• AAAI has a set of Information on NLP
• The ACL NLP/CL Universe which is "a Web catalog/search engine that is devoted to Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics Web sites." It seems fairly comprehensive and has been updated within the last several months. It appears that users can add entries.
• A set of links at Stanford. Some of these are dead, but many are not.
• A set of links from a project at MIT. (This may not be being maintained?)
• Also worth noting from FraCaS is a list of Projects in or relating to (computational) semantics. Many of these may be somewhat old.

Courses with information online

• There is a computational semantics course regularly taught at Tilburg University, by Harry Bunt and Reinhard Muskens, with several papers online.
• This site, which is in german, looks to be a computational linguistics course, including lecture notes. (suggested by Per Anker Jensen)
• Steven Bird's course CIS 530: Computational Linguistics, which has slides and assignments available. (suggested by Mark Liberman)
• A course in Computational Semantics was taught at Utrecht in Fall 2000. This has assignments and some course notes. (page in english).
• Another Computational Semantics course was taught at Technion at some point (and perhaps is still being taught?). There are some exercises and solutions, but unfortunately no lecture notes that I can see.

last updated Nov, 2003 by Kyle Rawlins