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SUMMARY:Truth conditions at scale\, and beyond - Guy Edward Toh Emerson (U
 niversity of Cambridge)
DTSTART:20241018T110000Z
DTEND:20241018T120000Z
UID:TALK222610@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Suchir Salhan
DESCRIPTION:Truth-conditional semantics has been successful in explaining 
 how the meaning of a sentence can be decomposed into the meanings of its p
 arts\, and how this allows people to understand new sentences. In this tal
 k\, I will show how a truth-conditional model can be learnt in practice on
  large-scale datasets of various kinds (textual\, visual\, ontological)\, 
 and how this provides empirical benefits compared to non-truth-conditional
  models. I will then take stock of the bigger picture\, and argue it is (u
 nfortunately) computationally intractable to reduce all kinds of language 
 understanding to truth conditions. To enable a more complete account\, I w
 ill sketch a new approach to approximate Bayesian modelling\, with the pot
 ential to explain how patterns of language use arise as a result of resour
 ce-bounded minds interacting with a computationally demanding world.\n\n*S
 peaker Biography*\n\nGuy Emerson is a computational semanticist at the Uni
 versity of Cambridge. He pursues research as an academic fellow at the Dep
 artment of Computer Science & Technology\, pursues teaching as a college l
 ecturer at Gonville & Caius College\, and promotes interdisciplinary work 
 as an executive director of Cambridge Language Sciences. He also supports 
 revitalisation of the Hokkien language\, and enjoys ballroom and latin dan
 cing.\n
LOCATION:Zoom link: https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/4751389294?pwd=Z2ZOSDk0eG1
 wZldVWG1GVVhrTzFIZz09
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