Talk/Colloquium
Title: Modeling of lexical semantics via formal semantics
Speaker: Dr. Anatole Minkowsky (EPAM Systems)
Host: Ralf Lämmel, Inst. for Software Technology and CS
Date/Time: 17 Jan 2012 (Tuesday), 6pm (ct)
Room: K 101
Abstract
Semantics is the study of meaning. It focuses on the relation between signifiers, such as words, phrases, signs and symbols, and what they stand for, their denotata. Our talk is an attempt to demonstrate how to build the semantics of English sentence constitutes via formal semantics in the form of signs and symbols.
A formalization of natural language semantics that is keyed to the computer will have a variety of very practical applications as well. Once computers are capable of analyzing natural language to a depth where it becomes possible to mechanically determine equivalence of meaning in context of statements in two different languages, and capable of generating well-formed natural-language discourse from such an analysis, mechanical translation of scientific and other expository text will be straightforward . Computer - assisted instruction will not realize its full potential until student answers can be evaluated with respect to their meaningful content and this evaluation used to generate appropriate remedial instruction form a body of lesson information . And most importantly, a capability for meaningful analysis and generation of natural language will make computers accessible to people for an infinite variety of problem-solving applications in the way which is best suited to them as human beings.
Talk materials: http://softlang.wikidot.com/local--files/talkminkovsky1701/SemanticsMinkowsky.pdf
Biography
Dr. Anatole Minkowsky is an instructor-consultant to hold trainings for management and customers and a teacher of English at the IT Company EPAM Systems. Together with this, he is the teacher of English at the IT Company itransition (Belarus) and a coordinator of high tech products at the Main Directorate of Science of the Belarusian State University (Belarus). Previously he was a senior lecturer at IT company Visutech Systems (Belarus), Business Management Academy (Belarus) and Gomel State University (Belarus). He held a doctoral degree in Germanic Languages from the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, Great Britain. His major area of research is Psycholinguistics.