Logic List Mailing Archive

CfP special issue of Computational Linguistics on "Formal Distributional Semantics"

Special Issue of Computational Linguistics: Formal Distributional Semantics
2nd Call for Papers

* Submission deadline: April 1st 2015 *

Call for Papers
---------------

The semantics of natural language consists of complex phenomena encompassing 
functional aspects such as quantification (e.g. "the cat" vs. "a cat") and 
conceptual aspects related to word meaning (e.g. "cat" vs. "animal"; "visit 
Boston" vs. "visit a friend"). No existing theory of meaning accounts for both, 
and existing approaches are typically biased towards one or the other. For 
instance, formal semantics focuses on functional aspects, providing a 
systematic treatment of compositionality through a clear syntax-semantics 
interface -- at the expense of lexical semantics. Distributional, or 
vector-space, semantics (Turney & Pantel, 2010), on the other hand, excels at 
lexical semantics phenomena ranging from word similarity to categorization, and 
it has recently made progress towards the treatment of composition (Baroni 
2013); however, functional aspects remain mostly unaccounted for.

Because of the complementary strengths of the two approaches, the computational 
linguistics community has started investigating proposals for an overarching 
architecture, combining formal and distributional semantics (e.g. Coecke et 
al., 2011; Erk, 2013; Lewis and Steedman 2013; Baroni et al., 2014). This 
effort holds the promise of significantly advancing the state of the art, as it 
is developing a model of semantics that accounts for both functional and 
conceptual aspects of meaning. However, given the fundamentally different 
nature of formal and distributional semantics, the enterprise poses great 
challenges from both a theoretical and an engineering point of view. The aim of 
this special issue is to explore the boundaries of a formal distributional 
semantics, by proposing relevant computational accounts of meaning and applying 
the corresponding frameworks to specific linguistic phenomena.


Topics
------

For this special issue, we solicit article submissions describing original 
research on any aspect of formal distributional semantics integrating a 
computational perspective. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

- Theoretical questions: What is meaning in formal distributional semantics, 
and how well do computational models simulate the relevant theories? How can 
distributional representations be related to the traditional components of a 
semantics for natural languages, especially reference and truth? Is similarity 
(the chief notion in distributional semantics) at odds with inference (one of 
the testbeds of formal semantics), or can it support it?

- Framework issues: Should a framework be developed that encompasses both 
formal and distributional semantics in a single formalism (Baroni et al., 
2014), or should the two approaches be kept separated and linked via systematic 
interactions (Lewis and Steedman 2013; Garrette et al., 2014)? How do different 
frameworks fare in standard computational semantics benchmarks (RTE, STS, 
etc.)? What further tasks and datasets can guide the development of 
comprehensive computational semantic frameworks?

- Linguistic phenomena: Can formal distributional semantics account for known 
phenomena? Can it shed new light on old puzzles? Can it handle newly observed 
phenomena? How does that impact Computational Linguistics / Natural Language 
Processing as a field?


Submission Date
---------------

Submission of full articles: April 1st 2015


Submission Instructions
-----------------------

Articles submitted to this special issue must adhere to the Computational 
Linguistics Style Guidelines. The submission guidelines can be found on the CL 
web site (http://cljournal.org/submissions.html). As in regular submissions to 
the journal, paper submissions should be made through the CL electronic 
submission system.


Guest Editors
-------------

Gemma Boleda

     Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain
     gemma.boleda AT upf.edu

Aurelie Herbelot

     University of Cambridge, UK
     aurelie.herbelot AT cantab.net


References
----------

Baroni, M. (2013). Composition in distributional semantics. Language and 
Linguistics Compass, 7:511-522.

Baroni, M., Bernardi, R., and Zamparelli, R. (2014). Frege in space: A program 
for compositional distributional semantics. Linguistic Issues in Language 
Technology, 9.

Coecke, B., Sadrzadeh, M., and Clark, S. (2011). Mathematical foundations for a 
compositional distributional model of meaning. Linguistic Analysis: A 
Festschrift for Joachim Lambek, 36(1-4):345?384.

Erk, K. (2013). Towards a semantics for distributional representations. In 
Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Computational Semantics 
(IWCS2013).

Garrette, D., Erk, K., and Mooney, R. (2014). A formal approach to linking 
logical form and vector-space lexical semantics. In Bunt, H., Bos, J., and 
Pulman, S., editors. Text, Speech and Language Technology: Computing Meaning, 
47:27-48. Springer.

Lewis, M. and Steedman, M. (2013). Combined Distributional and Logical 
Semantics. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics 
1:179-192.

Turney, P. D. and Pantel, P. (2010). From frequency to meaning: Vector space 
models of semantics. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 37:141-188.


-- 
Dr. Aurelie Herbelot
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~ah433
aurelie.herbelot@cantab.net