LING848, FALL 2023
Topics in Computational Pragmatics
Instructors
Philip Resnik, resnik@umd.edu [he/him/his]
Where/When
Currently planning Wednesdays 2-4:30pm (but this may change). Location TBD. The plan for this is to be an in-person class but I may add hybrid Zoom participation in order to facilitate wide access to people who are interested.
Overview of Course Goals
In this seminar we'll explore computational approaches to pragmatics as interpreted in a very broad sense. I'm interested both in the computational angle on relevant cognitive and social science questions, and also in the way that language technologies are addressing pragmatics-related aspects of language understanding, or not. (Almost certainly including a very strong presence of deep learning and large language models in many of our discussions, but the intended audience here is a multidisciplinary one, not just people who view themselves as computational -- people from all interested disciplines are welcome.)
In general, I expect this to be a readings-and-discussion course. Typically students are responsible for reading papers or articles, posting a "reactions piece" ahead of class, participating in class discussions, leading some number of class discussions during the semester, and doing a final project that results in a term paper.
This course page is currently just a stub, and in particular the specific readings are yet to be determined (and I'm open to input).
More details will arrive in due time!
Philip Resnik, Professor
Department of Linguistics and Institute for Advanced Computer Studies
Department of Linguistics
1401 Marie Mount Hall
University of Maryland Phone: (301) 405-7002
College Park, MD 20742 USA Fax: (301) 405-7104
http://umiacs.umd.edu/~resnik E-mail: resnik@umd.edu