We are pleased to RE-announce this workshop at ESSLLI 2021 held virtually.
For more information, see below or contact the organizers Shane Steinert-Threlkeld (University of Washington) and Jakub Szymanik (University of Amsterdam).
Preliminary Program
Monday, August 9
14.00 – 15.00 Dieuwke Hupkes, “Compositionality in the era of neural networks”
15.00-15.30 Francis Mollica, Geoff Bacon, Yang Xu, Terry Regier, and Charles Kemp. “Tense marking and the tradeoff between code length and informativeness”
15.30-16.00 Coffee break
16.00-16.30 Laura Aina, Thomas Brochhagen, and Gemma Boleda. “Word interpretation with deep language models: expectations, the lexicon, and their interaction”
16.30-17.00 Helena Aparicio, Roger Levy, and Elizabeth Coppock. “Referential garden path effects in modified Haddock descriptions”
17.00-17.30 Geoff Bacon, Terry Regier, and Noga Zaslavsky. “Distributional semantics and blind individuals’ knowledge of color terms”
Tuesday, August 10
12.00-12.30 Xixian Liao. “Coherence-driven predictability and referential form: evidence from English corpus data”
12.30-13.00 Alicja Dobrzeniecka and Rafal Urbaniak. “A bayesian method of cosine-based word2vec bias estimation”
13.00-14.00 Lunch break
14.00-15.00 Mora Maldonado, “Us and Them or How learning and communicative biases shape person systems”
15.00-15.30 Lisa Bylinina, Aleksei Tikhonov and Ekaterina Garmash. “Artificial Language Learning for Pre-Trained Language Models: Degree Modification and Polarity”
15.30-16.00 Coffee break
16.00-17.00 Benjamin Spector, “Explaining gaps in the logical lexicon of natural languages: A decision-theoretic perspective on the square of Aristotle” (joint work with Émile Enguehard)
17.00-17.30 Britta Grusdt and Michael Franke. “Probabilistic Modeling Pragmatic Use of Conditionals”
Important Dates (UPDATED):
Workshop: August 9-10, 2021
Deadline submissions: 14 June 2021
Notification of acceptance: 15 July 2021
Final program: 1 August 2021
Call for papers:
The field of natural language semantics has undergone what some refer to as an ‘experimental turn’ and is arguably currently undergoing a ‘computational turn’. By expanding the toolbox available to the semanticist, these two turns have the effect of expanding the phenomena that can be explained and the varieties of semantic explanation that can be offered.
For example, experimental methods can help distinguish between alternative explanations of semantic effects, e.g. whether to classify controversial phenomena as implicatures or presuppositions. Similarly, computational models of semantics can generate fine-grained and non-categorical predictions that can fruitfully be tested experimentally. And both kinds of methods can be used to ask questions about the emergence of semantic structures in language, including which factors influence their distribution and typology.
Given this wider toolbox and purview, we aim to gather a workshop to showcase exciting new work that develops new semantic explanations using experimental and computational methods, as well as to invite broader reflection on the methodology of semantics now and in its future.
Topics of potential interest include but are not limited to:
- Experimental semantics and pragmatics
- Graded/non-categorical semantic theories and explanations
- Information-theoretic measures and explanations in semantics and pragmatics
- Semantic universals
- Learnability and evolution of semantics and pragmatics
- Bayesian approaches to semantics and pragmatics
- Probing neural models for learned semantic representations
- Semantics in emergent communication protocols
- The methodology of semantics
We invite anonymized submission of abstracts of 2 pages (12 pt font; 1in or 2.5cm margins) — with an extra page for references of figures — on new research on topics related to those listed above by JUNE 14. Please submit via EasyChair here.
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS:
- Dieuwke Hupkes (Amsterdam)
- Mora Maldonado (Edinburgh)
- Benjamin Spector (Paris)
Program Committee:
- Dylan Bumford
- Fausto Carcassi
- Simon Charlow
- Emmanuel Chemla
- Alexandre Cremers
- Milica Denić
- Judith Degen
- Jakub Dotlačil
- Thomas Graf
- Dan Lassiter
- Mora Maldonado
- Steven Piantadosi
- Paul Pietroski
- Chris Potts
- Fabian Schlotterbeck
- Gregory Scontras
- Stephanie Solt
- Mark Steedman
- Shane Steinert-Threlkeld (co-chair)
- Jakub Szymanik (co-chair)
- MH Tessler
- Alexis Wellwood
- Adina Williams
- Yoad Winter