CSE Colloquium: How to marry a star: Probabilistic constraints for meaning in context

Zoom link: https://psu.zoom.us/j/99571945922?pwd=S3FiOGZ5RE9RTTN1MXBZK2NUejRjdz09

Abstract: Context has a large influence on word meaning. When we look closely, there is not simply a single contextual constraint, but multiple interacting and sometimes competing constraints, including selectional constraints and discourse topic. We develop a probabilistic generative model of utterance understanding that takes into account different interacting contextual influences on word meaning, and combines word meaning with a formal logic account of sentence meaning in a single model. The model characterizes utterance understanding as probabilistically describing the situation underlying the utterance. We present small-scale experiments with the model, and discuss directions for extending its scale. 

Biography: Katrin Erk is a professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research expertise is in the area of computational linguistics, especially semantics. Her work is on distributed, flexible approaches to describing word meaning, and on combining them with logic-based representations of sentences and other larger structures. At the word level, she is studying flexible representations of meaning in context, independent of word sense lists. At the sentence level, she is looking into probabilistic frameworks that can draw weighted inferences from combined logical and distributed representations. Katrin Erk completed her dissertation on tree description languages and ellipsis at Saarland University in 2002.