This course focuses on new ideas and technologies in incremental syntactic and semantic processing. Incremental parsing of natural language from a syntactic perspective has a well-developed literature, with a variety of theories and techniques developed with an eye towards a variety of goals and applications. However, adapting semantic representations to these technologies involves an additional dimension of challenges from formal, psycholinguistic, and engineering perspectives.

Through readings from recent literature, we will cover several aspects of this topic. We will start with the psycholinguistic and application-oriented motivations for incremental processing at the syntactic and semantic level. We will then cover some of the most current work on psycholinguistically-plausible approaches to incremental syntax (based in TAG, CCG, PCFG, etc.). After that, we will move on to recent developments in semantics, such as neo-Davidsonian approaches and minimal recursion semantics. We discuss how these approaches can be integrated with compositional distributional approaches to semantics.

Additional topics will be covered as time and student interest permits.

We plan to give every student at least one opportunity to present a relevant paper from the literature and lead discussion about its contents. The format will depend on how many students attend the course. Projects may also be considered depending on course attendance.

We will pick relevant topics to fit the above from the reading list below. We will expand this as the semester moves on. Relevant suggestions from students are welcome. Some papers listed below do indeed logically belong in more than one category. Time permitting, we may cover other special topics.