Foundational Structures for Compositional Meaning
Lead Research Organisation:
Queen Mary University of London
Department Name: Sch of Electronic Eng & Computer Science
Abstract
Words are the building blocks of sentences, yet meaning of a sentence goes well beyond meanings of the words therein. Indeed, while we do have dictionaries for words, we don't seem to need them to infer the meaning of a sentence from meanings of its constituents. Discovering the process of meaning assignment in natural languages is one of the most foundational issues in linguistics and computer science, whose findings will increase our understanding of cognition and intelligence and may assist in applications to automating language-related tasks, such as document search as done by Google.
To date, the compositional logical and the distributional probabilistic models have provided two complementary partial solutions to the problem of meaning assigning in natural languages. The logical approach is based on classic ideas from mathematical logic, mainly Frege's principle that meaning of a sentence can be derived from the relations of the words in it. The distributional model is more recent, it can be related to Wittgenstein's philosophy of `meaning as use', whereby meanings of words can be determined from their context. The logical models have been the champions on the theory side, whereas in practice their probabilistic rivals have provided the best predictions. This two-sortedness of defining properties of meaning: `logical form' versus `contextual use', has left the question of `what is the foundational structure of meaning?' even more open a question than before. This project has ambitious and far-reaching goals; it aims to bring together these two complementary concepts to tackle the question. And it aims to do so by bridging the fields of linguistics, computer science, logic, probability theory, category theory, and even physics. Its scope is foundational, multi and inter disciplinary, with an eye towards applications.
Meaning assignment is a dynamic interactive process involving grammar and logic as well as meanings of words. Both of the two existing approaches to language miss a crucial aspect of this process: the logical model ignores meanings of words, the distributional model ignores the grammar and logic. We aim to model the entire dynamic process alongside the following three strands of integration, foundations, and applications.
(I) In integration we develop a process of meaning assignment that acts with the compositional forms of the logical model on the contextual word-meaning entities of the distributional model.
(II) In foundations, we go beyond classical logical principles of compositionality and context-based models of meaning to develop more fundamental processes of meaning assignments based on novel information-flow techniques, mainly from physics, but also from other linguistic approaches and other models of word meaning, such as ontological domains and conceptual spaces.
(III) In applications, we evaluate our theories against naturally occurring data and apply the results to practical issues based on meaning inference and similarity, e.g. in search. To be able to work with logical connectives in Google, one needs to re-enter them by hand in the `advanced search' tab, by manually decomposing the logical structure of the sentence and moreover providing the extra context for their different meanings. This is fundamentally non-compositional and goes against the spirit of automated search. It is exactly here that the lack of compositional methods in meaning assignment causes practical problems and where our compositional methods become of use. Hence, we aim to put forward our results to tackle such problems, e.g. to be able to use our sentence similarity models for paraphrasing, question-answering, and retrieving documents that have the same meaning and/or are about the same subject. Our proposed partnership with Google, ensures access to real life data and helps implementation and applicability of our methods in small and large scales.
To date, the compositional logical and the distributional probabilistic models have provided two complementary partial solutions to the problem of meaning assigning in natural languages. The logical approach is based on classic ideas from mathematical logic, mainly Frege's principle that meaning of a sentence can be derived from the relations of the words in it. The distributional model is more recent, it can be related to Wittgenstein's philosophy of `meaning as use', whereby meanings of words can be determined from their context. The logical models have been the champions on the theory side, whereas in practice their probabilistic rivals have provided the best predictions. This two-sortedness of defining properties of meaning: `logical form' versus `contextual use', has left the question of `what is the foundational structure of meaning?' even more open a question than before. This project has ambitious and far-reaching goals; it aims to bring together these two complementary concepts to tackle the question. And it aims to do so by bridging the fields of linguistics, computer science, logic, probability theory, category theory, and even physics. Its scope is foundational, multi and inter disciplinary, with an eye towards applications.
Meaning assignment is a dynamic interactive process involving grammar and logic as well as meanings of words. Both of the two existing approaches to language miss a crucial aspect of this process: the logical model ignores meanings of words, the distributional model ignores the grammar and logic. We aim to model the entire dynamic process alongside the following three strands of integration, foundations, and applications.
(I) In integration we develop a process of meaning assignment that acts with the compositional forms of the logical model on the contextual word-meaning entities of the distributional model.
(II) In foundations, we go beyond classical logical principles of compositionality and context-based models of meaning to develop more fundamental processes of meaning assignments based on novel information-flow techniques, mainly from physics, but also from other linguistic approaches and other models of word meaning, such as ontological domains and conceptual spaces.
(III) In applications, we evaluate our theories against naturally occurring data and apply the results to practical issues based on meaning inference and similarity, e.g. in search. To be able to work with logical connectives in Google, one needs to re-enter them by hand in the `advanced search' tab, by manually decomposing the logical structure of the sentence and moreover providing the extra context for their different meanings. This is fundamentally non-compositional and goes against the spirit of automated search. It is exactly here that the lack of compositional methods in meaning assignment causes practical problems and where our compositional methods become of use. Hence, we aim to put forward our results to tackle such problems, e.g. to be able to use our sentence similarity models for paraphrasing, question-answering, and retrieving documents that have the same meaning and/or are about the same subject. Our proposed partnership with Google, ensures access to real life data and helps implementation and applicability of our methods in small and large scales.
Planned Impact
On the knowledge side, the proposed research will cause significant scientific advances across different disciplines of logic, linguistics, mathematics, physics, and computer science. This is by modeling the process of cognition and natural language generation and developing new mathematics, logic, and high level diagrammatic tools.
The project has 3 partners, from Computer Science in Cambridge, Cognitive Sciences and Artificial Intelligence in Utrecht, and industry in Google. These extend the geographical boundaries of the impacts of the project from UK to Europe and the US, but also from academia to industry. I also have on-going collaborations with experts from these various disciplines in venues including UK, Italy, France, USA, and Canada.
On the economy and social side, internet with its huge pool of services and data has become an inseparable part of our daily lives. The theoretical results of this project will be put forward to improve the quality of services on the internet. At the moment documents are identifies as bags of their words. If the relationships between the words is also taken into account, language processing tasks will hugely benefit, for instance tasks such as information retrieval from text and document search. As a result, new techniques for applications such as question answering and textual entailment will be developed, better answers to online questions will be provided, and more comprehensible summaries of news and articles will be constructed automatically. The partnership with Google and Cambridge is exactly towards following and realizing this pathway.
From the other side of the spectrum, the results will help us understand the nature of intelligence and language understanding. This has conceptual importance of its own, will improve the quality of human life in due time, by facilitating mutual understanding in society and across societies of different languages.
Finally, the proposed theoretical setting is based on using simple diagrammatic techniques to depict mathematical structure and logic. The simplicity and accessibility of these methods provides the public with a chance to understand advanced academic developments, a chance which will have an impact on educating the society. We have had open sessions to introduce Computer Science research to high school students and especially to girls in Oxford. The diagrammatic methods and their application areas caused much discussion with and within the students.
On the academic side, apart from publishing articles and attending already-established workshops and conferences, I have asked for funding to organize two workshops. This is to fill the interdisciplinary gap and bring together researchers from the different disciplines of the project, so that we can discuss and disseminate ideas and results and help start a multi-subject community across these different fields. I will also organize the interdisciplinary seminar series of the logic group of computing lab at oxford. These are open to all academic fields and also the public. Other impacts are through training and teaching. I have asked funding for a doctorate student and plan to continue lecturing my field of expertise based on the project. I have already been invited to give advanced lecture series about the subject in Utrecht and in a Masters course in Cognitive Science in University of Latvia.
The project has 3 partners, from Computer Science in Cambridge, Cognitive Sciences and Artificial Intelligence in Utrecht, and industry in Google. These extend the geographical boundaries of the impacts of the project from UK to Europe and the US, but also from academia to industry. I also have on-going collaborations with experts from these various disciplines in venues including UK, Italy, France, USA, and Canada.
On the economy and social side, internet with its huge pool of services and data has become an inseparable part of our daily lives. The theoretical results of this project will be put forward to improve the quality of services on the internet. At the moment documents are identifies as bags of their words. If the relationships between the words is also taken into account, language processing tasks will hugely benefit, for instance tasks such as information retrieval from text and document search. As a result, new techniques for applications such as question answering and textual entailment will be developed, better answers to online questions will be provided, and more comprehensible summaries of news and articles will be constructed automatically. The partnership with Google and Cambridge is exactly towards following and realizing this pathway.
From the other side of the spectrum, the results will help us understand the nature of intelligence and language understanding. This has conceptual importance of its own, will improve the quality of human life in due time, by facilitating mutual understanding in society and across societies of different languages.
Finally, the proposed theoretical setting is based on using simple diagrammatic techniques to depict mathematical structure and logic. The simplicity and accessibility of these methods provides the public with a chance to understand advanced academic developments, a chance which will have an impact on educating the society. We have had open sessions to introduce Computer Science research to high school students and especially to girls in Oxford. The diagrammatic methods and their application areas caused much discussion with and within the students.
On the academic side, apart from publishing articles and attending already-established workshops and conferences, I have asked for funding to organize two workshops. This is to fill the interdisciplinary gap and bring together researchers from the different disciplines of the project, so that we can discuss and disseminate ideas and results and help start a multi-subject community across these different fields. I will also organize the interdisciplinary seminar series of the logic group of computing lab at oxford. These are open to all academic fields and also the public. Other impacts are through training and teaching. I have asked funding for a doctorate student and plan to continue lecturing my field of expertise based on the project. I have already been invited to give advanced lecture series about the subject in Utrecht and in a Masters course in Cognitive Science in University of Latvia.
Organisations
- Queen Mary University of London (Lead Research Organisation)
- McGill University (Collaboration)
- University of Montpellier (Collaboration)
- Czech Technical University in Prague (Collaboration)
- University of Padova (Collaboration)
- University of Tilburg (Collaboration)
- University of Chieti-Pescara (Collaboration)
- UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE (Collaboration)
- University of Oxford (Collaboration)
- National Center for Scientific Research (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique CNRS) (Collaboration)
- Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) (Collaboration)
- University of Amsterdam (Collaboration)
- Utrecht University (Collaboration)
- University of Barcelona (Collaboration)
- University College London (Fellow)
People |
ORCID iD |
Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh (Principal Investigator / Fellow) |
Publications
Balkir E.
(2016)
Sentence Entailment in Compositional Distributional Semantics
Coecke B
(2013)
Lambek vs. Lambek: Functorial vector space semantics and string diagrams for Lambek calculus
in Annals of Pure and Applied Logic
Dyckhoff R
(2013)
Algebra, proof theory and applications for an intuitionistic logic of propositions, actions and adjoint modal operators
in ACM Transactions on Computational Logic
Grefenstette E
(2015)
Concrete Models and Empirical Evaluations for the Categorical Compositional Distributional Model of Meaning
in Computational Linguistics
Description | In 2020-2021, with PhD students we extended the setting to discourse phenomena such as anaphora and ellipsis. We developed vector semantics for a new logic that has not been used for this purpose before and experimented with it in disambiguation tasks. We have had three recent findings: 1- The tensor-based models of compositional distributional semantics, inspired by mathematical models of quantum mechanics, can reason about entailment as well as similarity. 2- The similarity measures used by compositional distributional semantics are mathematically the same as the relvance measures used in Information Retrieval. 3- Adding bi-algebtas to the setting of compact closed categories enables the underlying compositional distributional semantics to reason about quantifiers. |
Exploitation Route | The findings of the first category above can be applied to entailment tasks other than the ones we have considered. The findings of the second category should be applied to retrieval datasets and have great potential to improve performance of search engines. For the third category, the theoretical predictions of the model need to be experimentally evaluated. |
Sectors | Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software) |
URL | https://msadrzadeh.com |
Description | In summer 2014, comanies ClotheNetwork and TelRock decided to implement the academic developments of the project (compositional vector models of natural language) as part of the prototype they were making for their Artificial Intelligence product. They hired a student of me as one of their summer interns and also paid me consultancy fees. In 2017 I was awarded a Royal Academy of Engineering Industrial Partnership Fellowship to work with the BBC R&D, as a result I have been working on content similarity of programmes and on improving their named entity tagger, I brought projects to students of my course to QMUL and also to Masters students. In 2019 I was awarded a second Royal Academy of Engineering Industrial Partnership Fellowship to work with the BBC R&D on their recommender systems. As a result of findings listed above, we will work a range of vector methods, but compositional and tensor methods will also be tested. These latter need a substantial computational resource and thus are not very efficient to consider as our main tools. |
First Year Of Impact | 2017 |
Sector | Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software),Retail |
Impact Types | Cultural Societal Economic |
Description | Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFSOR) International Grant |
Amount | £300,000 (GBP) |
Funding ID | ECSR1B1R |
Organisation | University of Oxford |
Sector | Academic/University |
Country | United Kingdom |
Start | 05/2014 |
End | 06/2017 |
Description | BLC |
Amount | £200 (GBP) |
Organisation | British Logic Colloquium |
Sector | Charity/Non Profit |
Country | United Kingdom |
Start | 03/2014 |
End | 04/2014 |
Description | British-Dutch Scientific Collaboration Scheme |
Amount | £7,000 (GBP) |
Organisation | British Council |
Department | British Council and Platform Beta Techniek |
Sector | Charity/Non Profit |
Country | United Kingdom |
Start | 09/2010 |
End | 10/2010 |
Description | Cross Domain Unified Representations for Content Similarity |
Amount | £50,000 (GBP) |
Funding ID | IF\192058 |
Organisation | Royal Academy of Engineering |
Sector | Charity/Non Profit |
Country | United Kingdom |
Start | 08/2019 |
End | 08/2020 |
Description | Multi-modal content similarity for predicting audience behaviour |
Amount | £87,696 (GBP) |
Funding ID | 20000034 |
Organisation | Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) |
Sector | Public |
Country | United Kingdom |
Start | 09/2020 |
End | 08/2024 |
Description | Wolfson College Oxford |
Amount | £600 (GBP) |
Funding ID | Workshop Funds |
Organisation | University of Oxford |
Department | Wolfson College |
Sector | Charity/Non Profit |
Country | United Kingdom |
Start | 08/2009 |
End | 09/2009 |
Title | Binary Entailment |
Description | Two datasets of intransitive and transitive pairs of sentences that fully entail each other. |
Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
Provided To Others? | No |
Impact | This is again midways between a dataest of pairs of words that entail each other and pairs of long sentences that do. It is designed to measure the effectivity of tensor-based composition operators in entailment tasks. |
Title | Fuzzy Entailment |
Description | Two datasets: one of intransitive sentenes and phrases and another of transitive sentences that entail each other. Gold standards are collected for degrees of entailment between the pairs of phrases and sentences from Amazon Mechanical Turk. |
Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
Provided To Others? | No |
Impact | This is a hand made entailment dataset, the first one that goes beyond words but does not consist of full blown large sentences of over 15 words. It is designed to compute the effectivity of tensor-composition methods for entailment tasks. |
Title | LACL and COLING datasets |
Description | three datasets of subject-verb, verb-object, and subject-verb-object upward entailment |
Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
Year Produced | 2016 |
Provided To Others? | Yes |
Impact | evaluating entailment on phrase and sentence level, using compositional tensor based methods. |
URL | http://compling.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/resources/ |
Title | NAACL Datasets for Disambiguation and Similarity for Sentences with Elliptical Phrases |
Description | A set of pairs of sentences with elliptical phrases, ranked by their degrees of similarity by human annotators, based on two tasks: verb disambiguation and sentence similarity. |
Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
Year Produced | 2019 |
Provided To Others? | Yes |
Impact | We found out that resolving the ellipsis will definitely improve the results of disambiguation and similarity degrees computed by the models. The way in which the ellipsis is resolved and the individual data points (vectors and tensors) used differentiate the individual results, but overall no matter what model or data used, adding and resolving ellipsis will improve these tasks. |
Title | SVO relevance dataset |
Description | This is a dataset of about 600 pairs of subject-verb-object sentences that are related to each other. These 600 are manually chosen from a set of 1000 for which gold standard human judgements were collected from Amazon MechanicalTurk. The judgements measure the degree of relevance of the two sentences, treating one as a query and the other as a document. |
Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
Provided To Others? | No |
Impact | This is the first dataset that is designed to compare methods from Information Retrieval and from Natural Language Processing. It is under final stages and will soon be made publicly available and a paper about it will be published as well. |
Title | Sentence similarity dataset |
Description | This is a set of pairs of transitive sentences whose meanings range from similar to dissimilar. |
Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
Year Produced | 2013 |
Provided To Others? | Yes |
Impact | The dataset has been used by other researchers in the community to validate their sentence representation models. |
URL | http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/activities/compdistmeaning/emnlp2013_turk.txt |
Title | Transitive sentence dismabiguation dataset |
Description | This was a set of pairs of sentences which has ambiguous verbs in them and the sentences where used to dismabiguate the verb. This was the first time transitive sentences were used in this task and our dataset was the first one of its kind. |
Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
Year Produced | 2011 |
Provided To Others? | Yes |
Impact | The paper containing the dataset has about 100 citations now and various researchers in the field of natural language processing use this dataset to validate their sentence representation models and techniques. |
URL | http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/activities/compdistmeaning/GS2011data.txt |
Description | Amsterdam |
Organisation | University of Amsterdam |
Department | Institute for Logic Language Information and Computation (ILLC) |
Country | Netherlands |
Sector | Academic/University |
PI Contribution | A conference and a journal paper were published and a joint workshop was organized. |
Collaborator Contribution | A conference and a journal paper were published and a joint workshop was organized. |
Impact | A conference and a journal paper were published and a joint workshop was organized. |
Start Year | 2008 |
Description | Barcelona |
Organisation | University of Barcelona |
Department | Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science |
Country | Spain |
Sector | Academic/University |
PI Contribution | co-organizing the Workshop on Statistical and Logical Models of Meaning in the 7th North American Summer School in Logic Language Information in Rutgers University NJ, US. co-supervising a PhD student together |
Collaborator Contribution | Knowledge about type-algebras and their applications to linguistics, being a leader and a senior figure of the field and thus helping in mentoring |
Impact | we are now in the process of editing the proceedings of the workshop into a volume of the Journal of Language Modelling: http://jlm.ipipan.waw.pl/index.php/JLM |
Start Year | 2016 |
Description | Cambridge |
Organisation | University of Cambridge |
Department | Computer Laboratory |
Country | United Kingdom |
Sector | Academic/University |
PI Contribution | Working on the implementation and experimental part of the theoretical work proposed in my EPSRC project |
Collaborator Contribution | Developing a dataset of relative clauses from real large scale corpora and experimenting with it using the theory developed together. |
Impact | we are writing a paper together and have plans to submit it to a journal. |
Start Year | 2013 |
Description | Chieti-Pescara |
Organisation | University of Chieti-Pescara |
Country | Italy |
Sector | Academic/University |
PI Contribution | We work on pregroup models of natural language together, a work that has resulted in the analysis of many languages such as Persian, Sanskrit, Hungarian, and also French and Italian. |
Collaborator Contribution | We work on pregroup models of natural language together, a work that has resulted in the analysis of many languages such as Persian, Sanskrit, Hungarian, and also French and Italian. |
Impact | Conference and Festschrift papers, listed in the publication section. |
Start Year | 2010 |
Description | Elisabetta |
Organisation | University of Padova |
Country | Italy |
Sector | Academic/University |
PI Contribution | Collaborating on two articles |
Collaborator Contribution | expertise on the linguistic side of the research |
Impact | two working papers |
Start Year | 2016 |
Description | LORIA-Nancy |
Organisation | National Center for Scientific Research (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique CNRS) |
Department | Lorraine Research Laboratory in Computer Science and its Applications (LORIA) |
Country | France |
Sector | Public |
PI Contribution | I was invited to visit Hans van Ditmarsch's group in LORIA for a week. My visit, including meals, travel, and hotel were fully funded by van Ditmarsch's ERC project CELLO. During this week, I gave a seminar and collaborated with two members of the group. |
Collaborator Contribution | The discussions with van Ditmarsh led to plans for organizing a workshop on Application of Modal Logic to Computer Science. The funding application for half of the expenses of the workshop is under review (submitted to CIMPA). Van Ditmarsch's project is to pay for the other half of the expenses. |
Impact | 1- seminar, 2- disucssions towards a paper 3- submission of funding application for a workshop. |
Start Year | 2015 |
Description | McGill |
Organisation | McGill University |
Department | School of Computer Science |
Country | Canada |
Sector | Academic/University |
PI Contribution | A number of conference and workshop papers were published and an MSc thesis in McGill was sueprvised. |
Collaborator Contribution | A number of conference and workshop papers were published and an MSc thesis in McGill was sueprvised. |
Impact | A number of conference and workshop papers were published and an MSc thesis in McGill was sueprvised. |
Start Year | 2007 |
Description | Montpellier |
Organisation | University of Montpellier |
Country | France |
Sector | Academic/University |
PI Contribution | We worked on categorical models of natural language. |
Collaborator Contribution | We worked on categorical models of natural language. |
Impact | Papers, listed in the publication. |
Start Year | 2010 |
Description | Oxford |
Organisation | University College Oxford |
Country | United Kingdom |
Sector | Academic/University |
PI Contribution | The collaboration is with `University of Oxford' not `University College Oxford', as indicated in the previous field, the drop-down list did not seem to have `University of Oxford' or `Oxford University' on its own. We work on the same categorical models of meaning. |
Collaborator Contribution | We work on the same categorical models of meaning. Our collaboration has resulted in coverage by the New Scientist Magazine, under cover heading `Quantum Linguistics, a leap forward for artificial intelligence'. |
Impact | conference and journal papers, listed in the publication section. |
Start Year | 2007 |
Description | Pere |
Organisation | Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) |
Department | Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (IIIA) |
Country | Spain |
Sector | Public |
PI Contribution | Working on planning using dynamic epistemic logic and supervising a phd student's thesis. |
Collaborator Contribution | Working on planning using dynamic epistemic logic |
Impact | Conference papers and a soon to be submitted journal version. |
Start Year | 2012 |
Description | Prague |
Organisation | Czech Technical University in Prague |
Department | Faculty of Electrical Engineering |
Country | Czech Republic |
Sector | Academic/University |
PI Contribution | giving seminars in Prague and London, working on a technical report that has led to a recent submission |
Collaborator Contribution | expertise on fuzzy logic and category theory |
Impact | Many Valued Generalised Quantifiers for Natural Language in the DisCoCat Model, Matej Dostal and Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh, QMUL Technical Report, 2016. |
Start Year | 2016 |
Description | Tilburg |
Organisation | University of Tilburg |
Country | Netherlands |
Sector | Academic/University |
PI Contribution | I visited Professor Reinhard Muskens and we collaborated on a paper.My expertise was the vector space models of meaning. |
Collaborator Contribution | Professor Muskens' expertise were lambda calculus models of natural language. It is the first time that these models are endowed with vector semantics. |
Impact | a paper in final stages. |
Start Year | 2015 |
Description | Utrecht |
Organisation | Utrecht University |
Department | Department of Languages, Literature and Communication |
Country | Netherlands |
Sector | Academic/University |
PI Contribution | co-organizing the Workshop on Statistical and Logical Models of Meaning in the 7th North American Summer School in Logic Language Information in Rutgers University NJ, US. co-supervising a PhD student together |
Collaborator Contribution | Knowledge about type-algebras and their applications to linguistics, being a leader and a senior figure of the field and thus helping in mentoring |
Impact | a workshop. we are now in the process of editing the proceedings of the workshop into a volume of the Journal of Language Modelling: http://jlm.ipipan.waw.pl/index.php/JLM |
Start Year | 2016 |
Title | Aximo |
Description | Automated software to check algebraic properties of pubich and private announcements in multi-agent systems |
Type Of Technology | Webtool/Application |
Year Produced | 2009 |
Impact | used during teaching in Oxford |
Title | Compositional Distributional Vector Builder |
Description | This software is developed by D. Milajevs, who is the PhD student supported by my grant. It inputs different copora of text and evaluation datasets, turns them into vector spaces, then outputs the results of the evaluation in tabular and graphical forms. |
Type Of Technology | Software |
Year Produced | 2016 |
Open Source License? | Yes |
Impact | Softwares similar to this do indeed exist: the ERC project COMPOSES of Marco Baroni from the Center for Mind/Brain Sciences of the University of Trento is one such example. But it is the first time that one can input different copora and datasets, as well as normalization schemes, and compare the performances of models across all the parameters, and further, display the results graphically. |
URL | https://fowlercorpora.readthedocs.org/en/latest/installation.html |
Description | ALCOP |
Form Of Engagement Activity | Scientific meeting (conference/symposium etc.) |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Type Of Presentation | workshop facilitator |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Other academic audiences (collaborators, peers etc.) |
Results and Impact | workshops brought together many people and sparked discussions across logicians in different departments, e.g. maths vs computer science and philosophy. na |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2014 |
URL | http://www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/~pbo/workshops/ALCOP2014.html |
Description | Conversation |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A press release, press conference or response to a media enquiry/interview |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Media (as a channel to the public) |
Results and Impact | I was asked to write an article about the wikipedia's robot trained to distinguish malicious articles by the Conversation news website. I was provided access to professional article-writing facilities and given an editor. The article was received and I got good feedback from colleagues who read it. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
URL | https://theconversation.com/profiles/mehrnoosh-sadrzadeh-210564/articles |
Description | Harrow |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | Local |
Primary Audience | Schools |
Results and Impact | Giving a talk about Women in Computer Science to Bentleywood High School for girls |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
Description | Invited talks 2 |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Other academic audiences (collaborators, peers etc.) |
Results and Impact | sparked discussions and collaborations na |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2008 |
Description | Logic and Structure in Computer Science and Beyond |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
Results and Impact | Bridging different logical and computational methods developed for different fields as varied as quantum contextually, natural language, psychology and game semantics for programming languages and databases. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2019 |
URL | https://132.229.214.8/lc/web/2019/1178/info.php3?wsid=1178&venue=Oort |
Description | PhysLin |
Form Of Engagement Activity | Scientific meeting (conference/symposium etc.) |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Type Of Presentation | workshop facilitator |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Other academic audiences (collaborators, peers etc.) |
Results and Impact | many disucssions betweem quantum physicists and computer scientists and linguists Oxford University Press expressed interest in publishing the proceedings and a book was published |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2010 |
Description | RI Master Class |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | Regional |
Primary Audience | Schools |
Results and Impact | Giving a master class in the Royal Institute's initiative to high school students from around London |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
URL | http://www.rigb.org/education/masterclasses |
Description | Royal Institute Master Class |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | Regional |
Primary Audience | Schools |
Results and Impact | 30 pupils from schools across London attended my master class which was on Natural Language Processing. The EPSRC funded PhD student of my grant (D. Milajevs) and myself gave a master class of 3 hours with light theoretical content and hands on web-based and programming tasks. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
URL | http://www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/public-engagement/ri-masterclasses |
Description | School Visit (Scurr) |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | Regional |
Primary Audience | Schools |
Results and Impact | 30 pupils from the Scurr Highschool in TowerHamlets attended this masterclass, given by me. I repeated the material of my Royal Institute master class on Natural Language Processing, with light theoretical content and hands on activities. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
URL | http://www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/public-engagement |
Description | Semantic Spaces at the Intersection of NLP, Physics, and Cognitive Science |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
Results and Impact | Semantic Spaces at the Intersection of NLP, Physics, and Cognitive Science (SemSpace2020) was the latest edition of a series of workshops that brings together research at the intersection of NLP, Physics, and Cognitive Science. Using the common ground of vector spaces, the workshop offers researchers in these areas an appropriate forum for presenting their uniquely motivated work and ideas. The interplay between the three disciplines will foster theoretically motivated approaches to understanding how meanings of words interact with each other in sentences and discourse via grammatical types, how they are determined by input from the world, and how word and sentence meanings interact logically. SemSpace2020 happened online and we had 100 people in the audience. A total of 14 academics presented their papers to this audience. The proceedings are being published as a special issue of the journal Cognitive Science. Previous editions were held in 2019 (https://sites.google.com/view/semspace2019/home), as part of ESSLLI 2019, in 2018 (https://sites.google.com/view/capns2018/home) co-located with the International Symposium on Quantum Interactions 2018, and in 2016 (https://sites.google.com/site/semspworkshop/), co-located with the 13th International Conference on Quantum Physics and Logic (QPL2016) . SemSpace2021 is to happen as a workshop of the 14th International Conference on Computational Semantics (14-18 June 2021). |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2020 |
URL | https://sites.google.com/view/semspace2020/home |
Description | Tungsten |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | Regional |
Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
Results and Impact | The fifth public Tungsten lecture was given by myself in the topic of Quantum Linguistics. The audience included academics but also business managers from Tungsten. The talk led to a long discussion afterwards and my team has since been in contact with the Tungsten research team. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
URL | http://www.tungsten-network.com/tcida/uk/events/ |
Description | Understanding natural language: logic or statistics, which one is more important? |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
Results and Impact | A series of public talks called This Week's Discoveries held in Lorentz Centre in Leiden, open to university students and professors. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2019 |
URL | https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/events/2019/12/this-weeks-discoveries---10-december-2019 |
Description | invited talks 1 |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Other academic audiences (collaborators, peers etc.) |
Results and Impact | inspired discussions and collaborations sparked industry collaboration |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2011 |
Description | media interest |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A magazine, newsletter or online publication |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
Results and Impact | family and friends who were not experts and colleagues who were not experts in the field got familiar with my research. industry people approached me because of this article |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2010 |
Description | online news |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A magazine, newsletter or online publication |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
Results and Impact | People refering to my work and getting interested. none yet. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2014 |
URL | https://www.technology.org/2014/05/21/entanglement-quantum-phenomena-natural-language-semantics-enta... |
Description | online news 2 |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A magazine, newsletter or online publication |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
Results and Impact | make public familiar with my work none just yet |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2013 |
URL | http://www.technology.org/2014/07/29/algebra-bridges-syntax-meaning-natural-language/ |
Description | school visiting department |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | Local |
Primary Audience | Schools |
Results and Impact | few people expressed amazement of the multidisciplinarity of the subject na |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2011 |