20 February 2019, LUNCH Seminar, Martha Lewis

We interact with computers every day, and often using something like human language. There is therefore a huge amount of research going into how to represent human language computationally. Modelling words as vectors has been one of the most successful approaches over recent years. However, it is not immediately clear how to combine word vectors together to make phrases and sentences. On the other hand, formal semantics gives a clear
account of how to compose words, but it is not so obvious how to represent their meanings. I will give an overview of the model I work with that shows how to combine word vectors using formal semantics. I will also describe its limitations and will appreciate ideas and questions.