En savoir plus
This book is a direct continuation of (Kornai, 2019), but unlike its predecessor, it is no
longer a textbook. The earlier volume, henceforth abbreviated S19, mostly covered material
that is well known in the field, whereas the current volume is a research monograph,
dominated by the author's own research centering on the 4lang system.
S19 attempted to cater to students of four disciplines, linguistics; computer science;
cognitive science; and philosophy. As Hinrich Schütze wrote at the time: "This textbook
distinguishes itself from other books on semantics by its interdisciplinarity: it presents
the perspectives of linguistics, computer science, philosophy and cognitive science. I
expect big changes in the field in coming years, so that a broad coverage of foundations
is the right approach to equipping students with the knowledge they need to tackle
semantics now and in the future."
The big changes were actually already under way, in no small part due to Schütze,
1993, who took the fundamental step in modeling word meaning by vectors in ordinary
Euclidean space. S19:2.7 discusses some of the mathematical underpinnings. This
material is now standard, so much so that the main natural language processing (NLP)
textbook, Jurafsky and Martin (2022) is already incorporating it in its new edition (our
references will be to this new version). But for now, vectorial semantics has relatively
few contact points with mainstream linguistic semantics, so little that the most comprehensive
(five volumes) contemporary summary, Gutzmann et al. (2021), has not devoted
a single chapter to the subject. Sixty years ago, McCarthy (1963) urged:
Mathematical linguists are making a serious mistake in their concentration on
syntax and, even more specially, on the grammar of natural languages. It is even
more important to develop a mathematical understanding and a formalization of
the kinds of information conveyed in natural language
A propos de l'auteur
Peter Jones is a jazz singer and journalist based in London.
He read English at St Peter's College, Oxford, and after a brief sojourn at the University of New Mexico he returned to England and began working as a pop music journalist. After a decade as a film and TV publicist, during which he was the researcher for the autobiography of Spitting Image founder Roger Law, he gained an MA in Film and Television Studies from the University of Westminster. Until 2015 he taught film and media at a variety of London colleges, and published a short book on black cinema (BFI Publishing), followed by a handbook for Media and Film students (Hodder Arnold).
For several years he played bass in a jazz sextet, before deciding to concentrate on singing. At around the time of his first album ('One Way Ticket to Palookaville' - 2013) he developed a serious interest in the work of Mark Murphy, which has continued ever since. He began working for London Jazz News, reviewing concerts and CDs, and conducting interviews, including one with Kurt Elling in 2015. His second album ('Utopia') was released in 2016.
