BRASOVEANU AND DOTLACIL TEACH COURSE @ ESSLLI 2018

Adrian Brasoveanu and Jakub Dotlacil will be teaching a class at ESSLLI 2018 titled “Computing Dynamic Meanings: Building Integrated Competence-Performance Theories for Semantics”. A brief description of the course content is given below:

The course will introduce a theoretical and computational framework for developing integrated competence-performance theories for natural language semantics. Specifically, the framework explicitly models semantic interpretation as part of a general cognitive architecture. This computationally-implemented theory of semantic interpretation as a cognitive process satisfies the following properties: (i) it is incremental (e.g., it proceeds in the standard, left-to-right fashion); (ii) it models cognitive processes needed in interpretation (in particular, access to and retrieval from declarative memory); (iii) it can be tested against performance data (online behavioral measures collected, for instance, in self-paced reading or eye-tracking experiments). The theory is built by connecting dynamic semantics approaches to natural language meaning and interpretation (DRT, Kamp 1981, Kamp and Reyle, 1993, FCS, Heim 1982, DPL, Groenendijk and Stokhof, 1991) with the cognitive architecture ACT-R (Anderson and Lebiere, 1998). This overall research program of explicitly modeling natural language interpretation as a cognitive process branches in many directions, since it can be applied to a variety of detailed experimental (performance/behavioral) data related to natural language meaning and interpretation.