Dear all,

This is to remind you that today Willem Zuidema will present at the TiCC colloquium.

Who: Willem Zuidema (Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, University of
Amsterdam)
What: Nonsymbolic models of compositional semantics
Where: DZ3
When: Wednesday, April 1, 12:30 - 13:30

Abstract:
Arguments for symbolic accounts of cognition, or more specifically a
symbolic `language of thought', often are arguments from personal
incredulity: symbolists can't imagine any way that (high-level)
cognition could operate other than based on rules & variables. This
is perhaps most strongly felt in the domain of natural language, where
formal grammars and logics have proven very useful for accounting for
grammaticality judgments, semantic inferences and other aspects of
language processing. In my talk, I will discuss my recent work with
Phong Le (ILLC, UvA) on developing a model of perhaps the most
important feature of natural language: the fact that the meanings of
sentences are (more or less) systematically derived from the meanings
of words and the way they are put together (`compositional
semantics'). Our model, called `Inside-Outside Semantics' (Le &
Zuidema, 2014), is based on the Recursive Neural Network architecture
(Goller & Kuchler, 1996; Socher et al., 2010) and obtains
state-of-the-art results in various benchmark tests in computational
linguistics. I will show that such models undermine the incredulity
about non-symbolic accounts of compositional semantics.  Finally, in
the spirit of Box's `all models are wrong, but some models are
useful', I will argue that the symbolic-nonsymbolic dichotomy is
unproductive, and that both types of models can be complementary at
different levels of description.

For the schedule of upcoming TiCC colloquia, follow this link.

We hope to see you all!

Alex, Lisanne & Paul.