Language and Computation Seminar, 2004/05: 
Underspecification and Incrementality

The theme of this year's L&C seminar is the role of underspecification in disambiguation  and language theorizing. We will cover both psychological evidence about language  processing - including evidence suggesting that much of language processing takes place incrementally - and formalisms that have been proposed to represent lexical, referential, and scope underspecification.

During  the Autumn term, the seminar will meet on Tuesday afternoon, 3-5, in the Colloquium Room in Computer Science (5A.540, next to Massimo's office).

This page: http://cswww.essex.ac.uk/LAC/LAC_undersp_seminar_syllabus.html

• Background I: Ambiguity and Vagueness
  • Manfred Pinkal,  Logic and Lexicon. Kluwer, 1995.
• Background II: Psycholinguistics
  • M. Gernsbacher (ed), The Handbook of Psycholinguistics, 1994.
  • G. Altmann (ed). Psycholinguistics: Core Concepts. Routledge, 2002 (especially volumes II and III)
• Background III: Early psychological work (not read in seminar)
  • Bever, T. G. (1970). The cognitive basis for linguistic structure. In J. R. Hayes (ed), Cognitive Development of Language. (p. 279-363). Wiley.
• Background IV: Latest complete  draft of Massimo's monograph ...
  • M. Poesio, Utterance Processing and Semantic Underspecification (pdf), February 2000
• October 19th: Introduction (Ambiguity, Vagueness, Combinatorial Explosion)
  • Massimo's handout
  • Some useful references:
    • Chierchia and McConnell-Ginet (1990), Meaning and Grammar, MIT Press. (Ch. 1, 3)
    • Hirst, G. (1987) Semantic Interpretation and the resolution of ambiguity, Cambridge. (Ch. 1)
    • Lyons (1995), Linguistic Semantics, Cambridge.  (ch. 1, 2, 3, and 9)
    • Pinkal, M. (1995), Logic and Lexicon, Kluwer.
• Incrementality: Psychological evidence and computational models  
  • October 26th (Massimo):  The Garden Path model.
    • L. Frazier (1987), Sentence Processing: A Tutorial Review. In M. Coltheart (ed),  Attention and Performance XII, Erlbaum, 559-586. handout
    • Also relevant:
      • G. T. M. Altmann and M. J. Steedman (1988), Interaction with context during human sentence processing, Cognition 30(3), 191-238
      • Ferreira, F. and Clifton, C. (1986), The independence of syntactic processing, Journal of Memory and Language, 25, 348-368
  • November 2nd: NO MEETING THIS WEEK!!
  • November 9th and 16th (Massimo): The role of lexical and discourse information, revisited.
    • M. C. MacDonald et al (1994), Lexical nature of syntactic ambiguity resolution, Psychological Review, 101(4), 676-703
    • Tanenhaus et al (1995), Integration of visual and linguistic information in spoken language comprehension, Science
    • Other useful papers:
      • Trueswell et al (1993), Semantic influences on parsing, Journal of Memory and Language, 33(3), 285-318
  • November 23rd (Doug, Massimo): computational models of human parsing.
    • ch. 6 of Hirst 1987
    • Kempen, G. (1996). Computational models of syntactic processing in language comprehension. Ch. 8 of T. Dijkstra and K. de Smedt (ed), Computational Psycholinguistics, Taylor and Francis.
    • Other readings:
      • Steve Abney  (1989). A computational model of human parsing. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 18, 129-144. (pdf)
      • Fernando Pereira (1985). A new characterization of attachment preferences. In D. R. Dowty and L. Karttunen and A. M. Zwicky (eds), Natural Language Parsing--Psychological, Computational and Theoretical perspectives, pages 307-319. Cambridge University Press
      • Stuart M. Shieber (1983).  Sentence Disambiguation by a Shift-Reduce Parsing Technique.  Proc. of IJCAI,  699-703
  • December  6th: Incrementality in lexical semantics
    • ch. 4 of Hirst 1987
    • Greg Simpson (1994), Context and the processing of ambiguous words. In M.A. Gernsbacher (Ed.), Handbook of psycholinguistics (pp. 359-374). San Diego: Academic Press
    • Swinney, D. A.. (1979). Lexical access during sentence comprehension: (Re)consideration of context effects. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 18:645-659
    • Other readings:
      • Tanenhaus  M.S., Leiman, J.L., and Seidenberg, M.S.  (1979). Evidence for multiple stages in the processing of ambiguous words in syntactic contexts. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 18, 427-440
      • Seidenberg M.S., Tanenhaus, M.K., Leiman, J.L., and Bienkowski, M.  (1982). Automatic access of the meanings of ambiguous words in context:  Some limitations of knowledge-based processing.  Cognitive Psychology, 14,  470-519
      • Tabossi, P. (1988). Accessing lexical ambiguity in different types of sentential contexts. Journal of Memory and Language, 27, 324-340
      • K. Rayner and S. A. Duffy,  (1986). Lexical complexity and fixation times in reading: Effects of word frequency, verb complexity, and lexical ambiguity. Memory and Cognition
  • December 14th: Jurafsky, D. (1996), A probabilistic model of Lexical and Syntactic Access and Disambiguation, Cognitive Science, 20, 137-194 (pdf)
  • January 20th: Incrementality in reference
    • Sedivy, Tanenhaus, Chambers & Carlson (1999). Achieving Incremental Semantic Interpretation through Contextual Representation. Cognition, 71(2): 109-147 (doc)
    • Arnold, J. E., Eisenband, J. G., Brown-Schmidt, S, and Trueswell, J. C. (2000). The immediate use of gender information: eyetracking evidence of the time-course of pronoun resolution. Cognition 76, B13-B26 (pdf)
• Underspecification: early parsing models and psychological evidence  
  • February 3rd: General arguments for underspecification, The Moses effect
    • AJ Sanford & P. Sturt (2002) Depth of Processing in language comprehension: Not noticing the evidence. Trends in Cognitive Sciences  6(9) pp 382-386
    • S. Barton and A. J. Sanford (1993). A case study of anomaly detection: Shallow semantic processing and cohesion establishment. Memory and Cognition 21(4), 477-487.
    • Other readings:
      • Some chapters from Lyn Frazier (1999), On Sentence Interpretation, Dordrecht: Kluwer
  • February 24th: Underspecification in syntax.
    • Marcus, M., Hindle, D.,  & Fleck (1983),  Talking about talking about trees, in Proceedings of the ACL (pdf)
    • Some readings from L. Frazier and C. Clifton (1996), Construal, MIT Press.
    • Other readings:
      • P. Sturt and M. Crocker (1996).  Monotonic Syntactic Processing: A Cross-Linguistic Study of Attachment. Language and Cognitive Processes; 11(5):449-494. (pdf)
      • Fernanda Ferreira, Karl G. D. Bailey and Vittoria Ferraro (2002). Good-enough representations in Language Comprehension. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 11-15.
  • March 10th: Underspecification in lexical semantics:
    • Lyn Frazier and K. Rayner (1990).  Taking on semantic commitments: Processing multiple meanings vs. multiple senses. Journal of Memory and Language, 29, 181-200
  • Other readings: Underspecification in reference: 
    • Garrod, S., Freudenthal, D. & Boyle, E. (1994) The role of different types of anaphor in the on-line resolution of sentences in a discourse. Journal of Memory and Language. 33, 39-68
• Evidence about scope
  • April 6th: Howard S. Kurtzman and Maryellen C. MacDonald (1993). Resolution of quantifier scope ambiguities. Cognition, 48, 243-279.
  • April 14th: R. Filik, K. B. Paterson, and S. P. Liversedge (2004). Processing doubly quantified sentences: evidence from eye movements. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review.  (pdf)
  • Other readings:
    • chap. 1 of Poesio 1994
    • Some papers by Gualmini and Musolino

• April 21st: ACL wshop on prepositions 

• Theories of logical form
  • May 11th? Moore, 1981; Schubert and Pelletier, 1982
  • May 18th: Fenstad et al, 1987
  • Alshawi and van Eijck, 1989
  • MRS
• Hobbs' "flat" logical representation  
  • Hobbs 1982, 1983, 1986
  • Verbmobil 2000?
• The logic of ambiguity
  • Pinkal (1996)
  • van Deemter (1996)
• The semantics of logical forms
  • Alshawi & Crouch 1992, Poesio 1991, 1996, possibly van Eijck & Jaspars

• Theoretical models: lexical underspecification 

  • Hirst (1987), ch. 5
  • Pinkal
  • Copestake & Briscoe
  • Poesio 1996
  • Pustejovsky 1998
• Theoretical models: underspecification in reference  
  • Alshawi (1991)
  • Poesio (2001)
• Theoretical models: syntax
  • D-tree theory, Backofen et al
• Theoretical models: Scope
  • UDRT: Reyle, 1993
  • Muskens
  • CLLS
    • Pinkal, 1996
    • Egg et al, 2001
  • Fox & Lappin 2004
  • ?? Hole semantics??
• Theoretical models: collective / distributive underspecification
  • Kempson & Cormack 1981?
  • Frank and Reyle 1995

Courses

• Niehren and Koller's ESSLLI 1999 course

Projects

• ARRAU (in construction)
• CHORUS

Other useful Web links:

• The old Underspecification bibliography (only until 1997)