At this week’s MCQLL meeting, Michaela Socolof and Laurestine Bradford will each give a talk about their current work.

When: Tuesday, October 4, 15h00–16h00 (Montréal time, UTC-4)

Where: MCQLL meetings this semester are in hybrid format. We will meet in-person in room 117 of the McGill Linguistics Department, 1085 Dr-Penfield. If you’d like to attend virtually, Zoom meetings will be held here.

All are welcome to attend.

Michaela Socolof

Title: Partial information decomposition and compositionality Abstract:

Partial information decomposition (PID) is an information-theoretic framework for decomposing mutual information; this talk will discuss its potential for quantifying compositionality. I'll begin by presenting the results of a study applying PID to the morphology domain by studying the task of quantifying fusionality, then discuss avenues for extending this approach to the word and phrase domain.

Laurestine Bradford

Title: Towards a Compositional Semantics for Dependency Syntax Abstract:

A language's syntax tends be documented before its semantics, but syntactic structures themselves already contain information about meaning. So, if we could find a way to easily extract the meaning from syntactic relationships, it could speed up the process of discovering the associated compositional semantic structures in a language. In this talk, I will present ongoing work attempting to find systematic mappings between Universal Dependencies (a massively cross-linguistic dependency syntax annotation scheme) and meaning structures. In particular, I will present promising directions in the treatment of determiners and verb argument structure.