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SUMMARY:Fine-grained differences and similarities in meanings - Graeme Hir
 st\, Department of Computer Science\, University of Toronto
DTSTART:20080123T161500Z
DTEND:20080123T171500Z
UID:TALK9619@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Timothy G. Griffin
DESCRIPTION:Writing or speaking requires making choices from words and syn
 tactic\nconstructions that have similar but not identical meanings.  Are t
 wo\nparties "foes" or "enemies"?  Did John meet Mary or was Mary met by\nJ
 ohn?  An important component of language understanding is recognizing\nthe
  implications of the nuances in the speaker's or writer's choices.\nI will
  describe our research on computational aspects of linguistic\nnuance\, fo
 cusing on the differentiation of near-synonyms and on the\nconsequences th
 at arise for knowledge representation formalisms.  In\naddition\, I will d
 iscuss how contemporary views of meaning in\ncomputational linguistics nee
 d to be broadened to take into account the\nchoices that the speaker or wr
 iter makes.\n\n\nGraeme Hirst is a professor of computer science at the Un
 iversity of\nToronto\, whose research covers a broad but integrated range 
 of topics\nin computational linguistics\, natural language understanding\,
  and\nrelated areas of cognitive science.  He is the author of two\nmonogr
 aphs: Anaphora in Natural Language Understanding (1981) and\nSemantic Inte
 rpretation and the Resolution of Ambiguity (1987). Hirst\nhas received two
  awards for excellence in teaching\, and has\nsupervised graduate students
  in more than 35 theses and dissertations\,\nfour of which have been publi
 shed as books.
LOCATION:Lecture Theatre 1\, Computer Laboratory
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