Current work on semantics and questions of logic and meaning for syntactic systems in generative grammar.

This class investigates the theory, method, and form of collage. It studies not only the historical precedents for collage and their physical attributes, but the psychology and process that plays a part in the making of them. The class was broken into three parts, changing scales and methods each time, to introduce and study the rigor by which decisions were made in relation to the collage. The class was less about the making of art than the study of the processes by which art is made.

This course includes materials on AI programming, logic, search, game playing, machine learning, natural language understanding, and robotics, which will introduce the student to AI methods, tools, and techniques, their application to computational problems, and their contribution to understanding intelligence. The material is introductory; the readings cite many resources outside those assigned in this course, and students are encouraged to explore these resources to pursue topics of interest. Upon successful completion of this course, the student will be able to: Describe the major applications, topics, and research areas of artificial intelligence (AI), including search, machine learning, knowledge representation and inference, natural language processing, vision, and robotics; Apply basic techniques of AI in computational solutions to problems; Discuss the role of AI research areas in growing the understanding of human intelligence; Identify the boundaries of the capabilities of current AI systems. (Computer Science 405)

This course will explore the state of the art in common sense knowledge, and class projects will design and build interfaces that can exploit this knowledge to make more usable and helpful interfaces. This year's theme will be about how common sense knowledge differs in different languages and cultures, and how machine understanding of this knowledge can help increase communication between people, and between people and machines.

ELLOandfriends is a social networking platform for students of English linguistics. It is the home of the ELLO-wiki, where you can find information and exercises dealing with topics ranging from Morphology to Sociolinguistics. We also have a blog, where you can find video recordings of lectures and podcasts. Beyond all this, you can get in touch with other students, form groups and discuss all the questions you might have. Best of all: ELLOandfriends is absolutely free.

This class will provide some answers to basic questions about the nature of human language. Throughout the course, we will be learning (in many different ways) that human language is a surprisingly intricate -- yet law-governed and fascinating mental system. In the first 2/3 of the class, we will study some core aspects of this system in detail. In the last part of the class, we will use what we have learned to address a variety of questions, including how children acquire language, ways in which languages are affected by contact with other languages, and the representation of linguistic phenomena in the brain, among others.

This core-curriculum linguistics class will provide some answers to basic questions about the nature of human language. Topics include the intricate system that governs language, how it is acquired, the similarities and differences among languages, and how spoken (and signed) language relates to written language, among others.

Relationship between computer representation of knowledge and the structure of natural language. Emphasizes development of the analytical skills necessary to judge the computational implications of grammatical formalisms, and uses concrete examples to illustrate particular computational issues. Efficient parsing algorithms for context-free grammars; augmented transition network grammars. Question answering systems. Extensive laboratory work on building natural language processing systems. 6.863 is a laboratory-oriented course on the theory and practice of building computer systems for human language processing, with an emphasis on the linguistic, cognitive, and engineering foundations for understanding their design.

Formal theories of context-dependency, presupposition, implicature, context-change, focus and topic. Special emphasis on the division of labor between semantics and pragmatics. Applications to the analysis of quantification, definiteness, presupposition projection, conditionals and modality, anaphora, questions and answers.

This course covers the entire family of programming languages, starting with an introduction to programming languages in general and a discussion of the features and functionality that make up a modern programming language. Upon successful completion of this course, the student will be able to: identify the common concepts used to create programming languages; compare and contrast factors and commands that affect the programming state illustrate how execution ordering affects programming; identify the basic objects and constructs in Object-Oriented Programming; explain the characteristics of pure functional functions in functional programming; describe the structures and components utilized in logical programming. (Computer Science 404)

How do words get their meanings? How can word meanings be represented and used by machines? We will explore three families of approaches to these questions from a computational perspective. Relational / structural methods such as semantic networks represent the meaning of words in terms of their relations to other words. Knowledge of the world through perception and action leads to the notion of external grounding, a process by which word meanings are 'attached' to the world. How an agent theorizes about, and conceptualizes its world provides yet another foundation for word meanings. We will examine each of these perspectives, and consider ways to integrate them.