LSA.104 | Commonsense Knowledge and Lexical Semantics

Jerry Hobbs
TR 8:15-9:55
location: 32-144

This course will explore the question of how artificial intelligence work in encoding commonsense knowledge can make possible richer theories of lexical semantics. This is a two-way street: AI theories can explicate notions required to characterize the meanings of words, but the nature of word meanings also impacts the kinds of AI theories we develop. In this course we will work both from formalizations of commonsense concepts and from close examination of textual data, asking what knowledge is required to understand the meanings of specific words in specific contexts, and how this knowledge can be captured in axiomatic theories.