UNIVERSITY OF HERTFORDSHIRE
             COMPUTER SCIENCE RESEARCH COLLOQUIUM

                            presents

    "What is Meaning? - Formalizing the Distributional Hypothesis"

                       Dr. Daoud Clarke
       (Computer Science, University of Hertfordshire, UK)

                    16 November 2011  (Wednesday)
                      Meeting Room C152

                  Hatfield, College Lane Campus
                            1 -2  pm

                  Everyone is Welcome to Attend

                  Refreshments will be available

Abstract:

The distributional hypothesis of Harris states that words have similar
meanings if and only if they occur in similar contexts. This idea has
been successfully used to build models of lexical semantics, in which the
meaning of a word is typically given by a vector describing its occurrence
in different contexts. Researchers are just beginning to investigate how
vector-based representations of meaning should be composed, allowing
reasoning about the meaning of phrases and sentences. In this talk I
will introduce Context-theoretic Semantics, which I developed as part
of my DPhil at the University of Sussex with David Weir. We proposed
a framework which uses algebras over the real numbers as vector-based
representations of natural language meaning. This provides a set of
properties which we would expect a method of composing meaning to have,
if it holds true to the notion of meaning as context. We also show that
these properties are satisfied by many methods of composition that have
been proposed in the literature.

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Hertfordshire Computer Science Research Colloquium
http://cs-colloq.herts.ac.uk