Language and Computation Courses
Foundational Course
The Lexicon: an Interdisciplinary Introduction,
Elisabetta Jezek (University of Pavia, Italy)
The course provides an interdisciplinary introduction to the study of words, their main properties, and how we use them to create meaning. It offers a detailed description of the structure of the lexicon, and introduces the categories that are needed to classify and represent the types of meaning variation that word display in composition; it also examines the interconnection between these variations and syntactic form, cognition and pragmatics. We use empirical evidence from corpora and human judgements to evaluate formalisms and methodologies developed in the field of formal linguistics, cognitive science, and natural language processing – particularly distributional semantics -to account for lexical-related phenomena. The key feature of the course is that it merges evidence-based theoretical accounts with computational perspectives. The measured and accessible approach make it an ideal foundational course for students and scholar across disciplines: linguistics, cognitive science, philosophy, computer science, artificial intelligence, and data scientists working on text mining.