100 Things You Always Wanted to Know about Semantics \& Pragmatics But Were Afraid to Ask

Abstract

Meaning is a fundamental concept in Natural Language Processing (NLP), given its aim to build systems that mean what they say to you, and understand what you say to them. In order for NLP to scale beyond partial, task-specific solutions, it must be informed by what is known about how humans use language to express and understand communicative intents. The purpose of this tutorial is to present a selection of useful information about semantics and pragmatics, as understood in linguistics, in a way that's accessible to and useful for NLP practitioners with minimal (or even no) prior training in linguistics. The tutorial content is based on a manuscript in progress I am co-authoring with Prof. Alex Lascarides of the University of Edinburgh.

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