Objective "The notion of meaning is central to many areas of Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Linguistics, Philosophy, and Cognitive Science. A formal account of the meaning of natural language utterances is crucial to AI, since an understanding of natural language is at the heart of much intelligent behaviour. More specifically, Natural Language Processing (NLP) --- the branch of AI concerned with the automatic processing, analysis and generation of text --- requires a model of meaning for many of its tasks and applications.There have been two main approaches to modelling the meaning of language in NLP. The first, the ``compositional"" approach, is based on classical ideas from Philosophy and Mathematical Logic, and includes formal accounts of how the meaning of a sentence can be determined from the relations of words in a sentence. The second, more recent approach focuses on the meanings of the words themselves. This is the ``distributional"" approach to lexical semantics and is based on the idea that the meanings of words can be determined by considering the contexts in which words appear in text.The ambitious idea in this proposal is to exploit the strengths of the two approaches, by developing a unified model of distributional and compositional semantics, and exploiting it for NLP tasks andapplications. The aim is to make the following fundamental contributions:1. advance the theoretical study of meaning in Linguistics, Computer Science and AI;2. develop new meaning-sensitive approaches to NLP applications which can be robustly applied to naturally occurring text.The claim is that language technology based on ``shallow"" approaches is reaching its performance limit, and the next generation of language technology requires a more sophisticated, but robust, model of meaning, which this project will provide." Fields of science humanitieslanguages and literaturelinguisticsnatural sciencesmathematicspure mathematicsdiscrete mathematicsmathematical logicnatural sciencescomputer and information sciencesdata sciencenatural language processingsocial sciencespsychologycognitive psychologyhumanitiesphilosophy, ethics and religionphilosophy Programme(s) FP7-IDEAS-ERC - Specific programme: "Ideas" implementing the Seventh Framework Programme of the European Community for research, technological development and demonstration activities (2007 to 2013) Topic(s) ERC-SG-PE6 - ERC Starting Grant - Computer science and informatics Call for proposal ERC-2012-StG_20111012 See other projects for this call Funding Scheme ERC-SG - ERC Starting Grant Host institution THE CHANCELLOR MASTERS AND SCHOLARS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE EU contribution € 1 087 930,00 Address TRINITY LANE THE OLD SCHOOLS CB2 1TN Cambridge United Kingdom See on map Region East of England East Anglia Cambridgeshire CC Activity type Higher or Secondary Education Establishments Principal investigator Stephen Clark (Dr.) Administrative Contact Renata Schaeffer (Ms.) Links Contact the organisation Opens in new window Website Opens in new window Total cost No data Beneficiaries (1) Sort alphabetically Sort by EU Contribution Expand all Collapse all THE CHANCELLOR MASTERS AND SCHOLARS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE United Kingdom EU contribution € 1 087 930,00 Address TRINITY LANE THE OLD SCHOOLS CB2 1TN Cambridge See on map Region East of England East Anglia Cambridgeshire CC Activity type Higher or Secondary Education Establishments Principal investigator Stephen Clark (Dr.) Administrative Contact Renata Schaeffer (Ms.) Links Contact the organisation Opens in new window Website Opens in new window Total cost No data