Philosophy of Language and Computation I, Spring 2024
ETH Zürich: Course catalog
Course Description
This graduate class, partly taught like a seminar, is designed to help you understand the philosophical underpinnings of modern work in natural language processing (NLP), most of which centered around statistical machine learning applied to natural language data. The course will alternate between presentations given by the professors and by students enrolled in the course, followed by discussion-based teaching on the topics of each class. The course is a year-long journey, but the second half (Autumn 2024) does not depend on the first (Spring 2024) and thus either half may be taken independently. In each semester, we divide the class time into three modules. Each module is centered around a philosophical topic. In the first semester we will discuss logicism, structuralism, and generative linguistics, and in the second semester we will focus on language games, information and pragmatics. The modules will be four weeks long, where we will read and discuss original texts and supplementary criticism together with recent NLP papers and discuss how the authors of those works are building on philosophical insights into our conception of language—perhaps implicitly or unwittingly.
The course will require a weekly reading of around 20 pages (with relatively high variance) and a weekly task (free-form response) related to the reading, which is to be completed online. The weekly tasks are short and not graded, but, in order to pass the class, at least 70% of the tasks must be completed. See this document for the guidelines on the free-form responses. The final grade will be based on one class presentation and one term paper (around 5-10 pages) which is to be turned in at the end of the semester. The term paper ideally corresponds to one of the three modules and the students will be expected to explore the relation of the topics discussed in class to work not presented in the class. For example, discussing how three recent NLP papers implicitly assumed a structuralist perspective on language would be a good topic.
Grading
Marks for the course will be determined by the following formula:
- 40% Class presentation
- 60% Term paper
More detailed instructions about the paper and presentation requirements can be found here:
Organization
Lectures: Tue 18-19, ML F 38. The lectures will be given in person. This recurring Zoom meeting (ID: 662 5551 6731) will be used throughout the semester for people who want to tune in remotely. However, given the discussion based character of this course, in person participation is strongly encouraged. The password can be found on the course Moodle page. The Zoom recordings will be made available on the course Moodle page.
Discussion Sections: Tue 19-20 ML F 38.
Communication Moodle will be the main communication hub for the course. You are responsible for receiving all messages broadcast in Moodle
Class Materials
News
17.2 Class website is online!
Syllabus and Schedule
| Week | Date | Module | Topic | Material | Reading |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 20.02.24 | Introduction | Images of Language | Introduction Slides | Borges (1940a), Borges (1940a) in Spanish, Borges (1940b), Borges (1940b) in Spanish, Borges (1942) Borges (1942) in Spanish |
| 2 | 27.02.24 | Language and Logic: Formal Representations of Meaning |
Meaning: Between Sense and Denotation | Intro to Module 1 Slides | Frege (1892), Frege (1892) in German, Russell (1905) |
| 3 | 05.03.24 | Formal and Natural Language | Carnap Slides, Montague Slides | Carnap (1955), Montague (1970) | |
| 4 | 12.03.24 | Semantic Compositionality in Distributional Settings | Baroni et al. Slides 1, Baroni et al. Slides 2 | Baroni et al. (2014) | |
| 5 | 19.03.24 | Logic, Compositionality, and Neural Nets | Zettlemoyer and Collins (2005), Andreas (2019) | ||
| 6 | 26.03.24 | Structuralism: The Search for the Right Units |
Structural Dualities | Saussure (1916), Saussure (1916) in French, | |
| 7 | 09.04.24 | Structure and Meaning | Harris (1954), Greimas (1966), Greimas (1966) in French | ||
| 8 | 16.04.24 | The Right Linguistic Units | Goldsmith (2001), Kim et al. (2015), Sennrich et al. (2016), Vania et al. (2018), Nawrot et al. (2023) | ||
| 9 | 23.04.24 | Arbitrariness of the Sign | Gutiérrez et al. (2016), Pimentel et al. (2019), Pimentel et al. (2021) | ||
| 10 | 30.04.24 | Recursive Structure: The Escherian Nature of Language |
Syntax vs. Distribution, Logic, and Behavior | Chomsky (1953), Chomsky (1955), Chomsky (1959) | |
| 11 | 07.05.24 | Syntactic Structures | Chomsky (1957), Chomsky (1956), | ||
| 12 | 14.05.24 | Syntactic Parsing—NLP’s Original Leaderboard | Charniak (2000), Hall et al. (2014), Vinyals et al. (2014), Dyer et al. (2016), | ||
| 13 | 21.05.24 | Computational Approaches to Human Syntactic Processing | Hale (2016), Hale (2001), Levy and Jaeger (2007), Delétang et al. (2022) | ||
| 14 | 28.05.24 | Conclusion |
Secondary Literature
| Module | Topic | Reading |
|---|---|---|
| Language and
Logic: Formal Representations of Meaning |
Philosophy | Ajdukiewicz (1936), Carnap (1947), Lambek (1958), Davidson (1967), Lewis (1970) |
| NLP | Steedman (1996), Wang and Eisner (2016), Lake and Baroni (2018), Ravfogel et al. (2019), White and Cotterell (2021) | |
| Structuralism: The Search for the Right Units |
Philosophy | Hjelmslev (1943), Harris (1951), Firth (1957), Hocket (1960), Gastaldi (2021) |
| NLP | Mielke and Eisner (2019), Nikkarinen et al. (2021), Mielke et al. (2021) | |
| Recursive
Structure: The Escherian Nature of Language |
Philosophy | Piantadosi (2023), Chomsky et al. (2023) |
| NLP | Klein and Manning (2003), Meister et al. (2021), Kitaev et al. (2022) |
Contact
You can ask questions on the Moodle forum. Please post questions there, so others can see them and join the discussion. If you have questions which are not of general interest, please don’t hesitate to contact us directly, i.e., email the lecturers with the TAs cc-ed.
