Special Topics in Media Technology: Computational Semantics

A photo of a computer screen with several overlapping application windows open, each displaying text.

Computers and their language. (Photo courtesy of openphoto.net.)

Instructor(s)

MIT Course Number

MAS.962

As Taught In

Fall 2002

Level

Graduate

Cite This Course

Course Description

Course Description

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.

Related Content

Deb Roy. MAS.962 Special Topics in Media Technology: Computational Semantics. Fall 2002. Massachusetts Institute of Technology: MIT OpenCourseWare, https://ocw.mit.edu. License: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA.


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