Events Semantics in Theory and Practice
3.0
creditsAverage Course Rating
This course explores selected topics in the nature of event representations from the perspective of cognitive science, computer science, linguistics, and philosophy. These fields have developed a rich array of scientific theories about the representation of events, and how humans make inferences about them -- we investigate how (and if) such theories could be applied to current research topics and tasks in computational semantics such as inference from text, automated summarization, veridicality assessment, and so on. In addition to classic articles dealing with formal semantic theories, the course considers available machine-readable corpora, ontologies, and related resources that bear on event structure, such as WordNet, PropBank, FrameNet, etc.. The course is aimed to marry theory with practice: students with either a computational or linguistic background are encouraged to participate. [Applications]
Fall 2013
Professor: Kyle Rawlins, Benjamin Van Durme
Students found the professor’s clear lectures and the assignments to be some of the good aspects of this course. They thought that the lecture slides were detail-oriented and that the assignments were practical in testing the materials. Students found that the professor would often review the same materials, which slowed down the class. Students also believed that there wasn’t enough time to cover all of the materials on the exams. They suggested adding review sheets to help them study and to limit how much the professor reviewed each class. Any prospective students wil find that knowing Python helps and are encouraged to take this course at the graduate level.