DAS Semantics

Francis (フランシス) Bond (凡土) : 2024, 2025.

This is the second part of 4UJ2/5UJ2 Syntax and Semantics.

In this part, we will look at how words convey meanings and how they can be combined to express richer meaning (semantics). We will show that meaning does not only come from the words themselves, but also from our own understanding of them, and that words can convey much more than simple truth-conditional meanings (pragmatics).

We will use concrete examples taken from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories and Karel Čapek's Válka s Mloky "War with the Newts". The course considers meaning from the smallest levels of words and morphemes, up through sentences to the stories as a whole.

Course Content

This part of the course introduces basic skills in semantic analysis, such as:

Course Page: https://bond-lab.github.io/Semantics/.

There is no set text-book, all the material is covered in the lectures. As a result, you need to actually come to the lectures. General guidelines to the course are given in the first lecture. You must read one story, and will carry out detailed analysis of the meaning at various levels — this course has homework. However, it is designed to be as interesting as possible, and the stories are some of the most popular in the world.

Course Outline

LectureContent (click to download) Tutorial Assessment
1
03-24		 Introduction, Organization: Main Issues
I saw a kid ️🪚🐐 / ️👀🧒 		Tute 1 Pick your language/group in moodle
2
03-31		 Theories of meaning and the meaning of words
What is a dog-cart? 		Tute 2 Project 1: Annotation Task
3
04-07		 Sentence meaning and compositionality
the windows were blocked by old-fashioned shutters 		Tute 3
4
04-14		 Quantification, Truth and Sentiment
Julia and I had no great pleasure in our lives		 Tute 4
Easter Project 1: Annotation Task
Due: 2025-04-25 23:59 (Fri)
5
04-28		 Idioms and Metaphors
to cross someone’s path		 Tute 5 Start Comparison Task
6
05-05		 Pragmatics and Discourse
kindly put your revolver in your pocket 		Tute 6
6+ Project 2: Write up
Project 3: Write up
Due: 2025-05-30 23:59 (Fri)

Required Reading

Other Resources

Assessment

My mind rebels at stagnation, give me problems, give me work! The Sign of Four

At the start of the semester you will be given a short passage from one of the stories that will be used by you throughout the course to study meaning. In the three projects you will examine and annotate different levels of meaning using on-line tools provided. This may be slightly harder if you are not a native speaker of English, but we will try to link to translations of the stories in as many languages as possible.

People doing 4UJ2 do both projects 1 and 2.

People doing 5UJ2 do projects 1, 2 and 3.

Project 1: Disambiguation (10%: individual work)

Identify and annotate word meaning for your own passage of one of the stories using wordnet as the sense inventory.

Project 2: Comparison (20%/15%: group work)

Compare and contrast your annotations with other annotators; re-annotate based on your discussion and write a short paper.

Project 3: Non-compositional meaning (5%: individual work)

Tutorials (20%)

I would like to use the results of your analysis in projects 1–3 to help further in research on meaning. If you would like me not to use your input, you may email me at any time up to one week after you get your results for this semester. If you do so, I will discard your input. Otherwise, I will use it to find out more about meaning, and you will be credited as 'students of DAS Syntax and Semantics'. I will also make it available for others to use under the same license as the materials I create (CC BY 4.0).

Creative Commons License
Course materials created by us are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License and are available at https://github.com/bond-lab/Semantics/.

Newt icon by parkjisun from Noun Project (CC BY 3.0)

Course adapted from Detecting Meaning with Sherlock Holmes.

Francis Bond <bond@ieee.org>
Computational Linguistics Lab
Palacký University, Olomouc