About

The first Uncertainty in Meaning and Representation in Linguistics and Philosophy Workshop will be held on 21-23 February 2018 in Jelenia Góra, Poland.

Workshop Call

Uncertainty of Meaning and Representation in Linguistics and Philosophy

In the past couple of years, meanings and their representations have become more uncertain and more probabilistic. This can be seen from the following developments:

• (1) Vagueness of boundaries and vagueness of conceptual content are traditional problems for logic and semantics, and have been addressed by probabilistic methods both in the past and more recently.
• (2) Recently stochastic concepts have emerged for trying to a capture lexical meanings, both in order to deal with ambiguity and in order to deal with prototype accounts of conceptual content.
• (3) In philosophical logic, attempts to use probabilities in accounting for a number of central notions in formal semantics have been proposed, for modalities, implication and causality.
• (4) The use of experimental methods in semantics leads naturally to more uncertain notions of conceptual content.
• (5) More from the perspective of machine learning, one obtains typically stochastic objects as approximations to meaning: the vectors of distributional semantics and other association based methods, that for many purposes can function as meanings.
• (6) In pragmatics, methods have been developed that try to reconstruct the traditional approaches by stochastic means and recursion.

Some of these developments concern uncertainty in meaning (1, 2 and 3), others use probabilities or related representations for representing meaning (4, 5 and 6). The workshop aims at strengthening the interaction between the different approaches and at making progress on the formal and foundational issues that arise around these developments.

Contributions

The programme committee will try to invite specific people to contribute in order to get a good mix of approaches. It will however also look at the contributions to the main Szklarska Poreba workshop to see if any talk would better be in the workshop programme. However, please write to the programme committee (henk.zeevat@uva.nl) if you have work which you feel is ideal for presentation in the workshop. We will invite you, if possible.