Class notes and homework

There hasn’t been very much posting on the blog here, but I thought I would take a moment to add a note about today’s class, since no slides were used.

I can’t really entirely revisit what I talked about here, but it was primarily drawn from the NLTK book, chapter 10, sections 1-5. We did run into the fact that Prover9 is not installed by default with Anaconda, so we were not able to see the theorem prover in action (and it is not expected that you will). As with much of this, my goal was to provide some idea of what is possible, the terminology, and where to find information about it. We won’t be directly working with Prover9, but you can install it if you find something it would be useful for.

On the whiteboard I spent a fair amount of time going over logical connectives, semantic models, valuation functions, lambda notation for functions.

Also, another thing that I had not resolved by the end of class was what exactly the homework would consist of. Since no homework dealt with the stuff we went over most recently due the BUCLD break, the homework just posted has both a classification task (authorship determination) and a more theoretical semantic exercise based on the stuff from today. The authorship part is quite short, and the semantics part appears quite long but is really quite a lot of reading with a few short tasks along the way. The semantics part of the homework should help solidify the ideas that were discussed during the class time.

The homework is here: HW 7

Also, we’re rapidly approaching the point at which course project ideas and proposals will be due. I will provide some specifications and ideas for that shortly. Because that snuck up on me a little bit, the due date for the proposals might be shifted to be after the Thanksgiving break, but of course settling on a project sooner is probably better. Anyway, more to come on that topic soon.