Post meeting summary for the first week discussion

During the meeting we have discussed semantic parsing with the focus paper "Inducing Probabilistic CCG Grammars from Logical Form with Higher-order Unification" by Tom Kwiatkowski, Luke Zettlemoyer, Sharon Goldwater, and Mark Steedman appeared in EMNLP 2010. The paper was based on the 2005 UAI best paper by Luke Zettlemoyer and Michael Collins, with a few extensions, including the representation generalizing over other formalisms and that lexical items can be multi-word, etc. People noted that semantic parsing is not necessarily constrained to CCG, as any other formalism could potentially be augmented with logical forms to conduct semantic parsing, eg. LFG. People have read some other related papers that address different problems, such as "Unsupervised Semantic Parsing" by Hoifung Poon and Pedro Domingos, which addresses the problem in unsupervised setting and handles the syntactic variations given the same semantic representation. People have also read papers that conduct semantic parsing with Machine translation methods. People have also discussed about the potential beneficiaries of doing semantic parsing, besides the natural language interface to database and so on. Text entailment was suggested as a possible one.