Semantics is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy, linguistics and computer science.
The School of Informatics is an academic unit of the University of Edinburgh, in Scotland, responsible for research, teaching, outreach and commercialisation in informatics. It was created in 1998 from the former department of artificial intelligence, the Centre for Cognitive Science and the department of computer science, along with the Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute (AIAI) and the Human Communication Research Centre.
Samson Abramsky is Professor of Computer Science at University College London. He was previously the Christopher Strachey Professor of Computing at Wolfson College, Oxford, from 2000 to 2021.
In semantics, mathematical logic and related disciplines, the principle of compositionality is the principle that the meaning of a complex expression is determined by the meanings of its constituent expressions and the rules used to combine them. The principle is also called Frege's principle, because Gottlob Frege is widely credited for the first modern formulation of it. However, the principle has never been explicitly stated by Frege, and arguably it was already assumed by George Boole decades before Frege's work.
Gordon David Plotkin, is a theoretical computer scientist in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. Plotkin is probably best known for his introduction of structural operational semantics (SOS) and his work on denotational semantics. In particular, his notes on A Structural Approach to Operational Semantics were very influential. He has contributed to many other areas of computer science.
Jerry R. Hobbs is an American researcher in the fields of computational linguistics, discourse analysis, and artificial intelligence.
Computational semantics is the study of how to automate the process of constructing and reasoning with meaning representations of natural language expressions. It consequently plays an important role in natural-language processing and computational linguistics.
In natural language, a deferred reference is the metonymic use of an expression to refer to an entity related to the conventional meaning of that expression, but not denoted by it. Several types of deferred reference have been studied in the literature.
Donkey sentences are sentences that contain a pronoun with clear meaning but whose syntactical role in the sentence poses challenges to grammarians. Such sentences defy straightforward attempts to generate their formal language equivalents. The difficulty is with understanding how English speakers parse such sentences.
A discourse relation is a description of how two segments of discourse are logically and/or structurally connected to one another.
Formal semantics is the study of grammatical meaning in natural languages using formal tools from logic, mathematics and theoretical computer science. It is an interdisciplinary field, sometimes regarded as a subfield of both linguistics and philosophy of language. It provides accounts of what linguistic expressions mean and how their meanings are composed from the meanings of their parts. The enterprise of formal semantics can be thought of as that of reverse-engineering the semantic components of natural languages' grammars.
Ann Alicia Copestake is professor of computational linguistics and head of the Department of Computer Science and Technology at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge.
Judith Tonhauser is a Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Stuttgart.
Emily Menon Bender is an American linguist who is a professor at the University of Washington. She specializes in computational linguistics and natural language processing. She is also the director of the University of Washington's Computational Linguistics Laboratory. She has published several papers on the risks of large language models.
Mirella Lapata FRSE is a computer scientist and Professor in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. Working on the general problem of extracting semantic information from large bodies of text, Lapata develops computer algorithms and models in the field of natural language processing (NLP).
Bonnie Lynn Nash-Webber is a computational linguist. She is an honorary professor of intelligent systems in the Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation (ILCC) at the University of Edinburgh.
In linguistics, a rising declarative is an utterance which has the syntactic form of a declarative but the rising intonation typically associated with polar interrogatives.
- Rising declarative: Justin Bieber wants to hang out with me?
- Falling declarative: Justin Bieber wants to hang out with me.
- Polar question: Does Justin Bieber want to hang out with me?
Alice Geraldine Baltina ter Meulen is a Dutch linguist, logician, and philosopher of language whose research topics include genericity in linguistics, intensional logic, generalized quantifiers, discourse representation theory, and the linguistic representation of time. She is a professor emerita at the University of Geneva.
In linguistics and philosophy of language, the conversational scoreboard is a tuple which represents the discourse context at a given point in a conversation. The scoreboard is updated by each speech act performed by one of the interlocutors.
Yael Sharvit is an American linguist who is Professor of Linguistics at UCLA. She specializes in semantics and the syntax-semantics interface.
