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SUMMARY:The Theory and Practice of Compositional Distributed Semantics - S
 tephen Clark
DTSTART:20141107T120000Z
DTEND:20141107T130000Z
UID:TALK54293@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Tamara Polajnar
DESCRIPTION:A combination of compositional and distributional/distributed 
 representations has many potential advantages for computational semantics.
  From the distributed side: robustness\, learnability from data\, ease of 
 handling ambiguity\, and the ability to represent gradations of meaning. F
 rom the compositional side: the ability to handle the unbounded nature of 
 natural language\, and the existence of established accounts of semantic p
 henomena such as logical words\, quantification and inference. The develop
 ment of such a combination has many challenges.\n\nThe first half of the t
 alk will describe a complete mathematical framework for deriving distribut
 ed representations compositionally using Combinatory Categorial Grammar (C
 CG). The tensor-based framework extends that of Coecke et al.\, which was 
 previously applied to pregroup grammars\, and is based on the observation 
 that tensors are functions (multi-linear maps) and hence can be manipulate
 d by the combinators of CCG\, including type-raising and composition. The 
 existence of robust\, broad-coverage CCG parsers opens up the possibility 
 of applying the tensor-based framework to naturally occurring text.\n\nThe
  second half will describe our ongoing efforts to implement the framework\
 , for which there are considerable practical challenges. I will describe s
 ome of the sentence spaces we are exploring\; some of the datasets we are 
 developing\; and some of the machine learning techniques we are using in a
 n attempt to learn the values of the tensors from corpus data.\n\nThis wor
 k is being carried out with Luana Fagarasan\, Douwe Kiela\, Jean Maillard\
 , Tamara Polajnar\, Laura Rimell\, Eva Maria Vecchi\, and involves collabo
 rations with Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh (Queen Mary) and Ed Grefenstette and Bob 
 Coecke (Oxford).
LOCATION:FW26\, Computer Laboratory
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