Okay, so sorry for being late.

As you know, the main determining factor for arriving on time in this university is the

elevators in the blue tower.

I got a bad luck here.

We were looking at language.

I've been giving you a kind of a whirlwind tour of language technology, what's kind of

in there and so on.

And I am trying now to show you that language and in particular the interesting bit of language,

namely the meaning and how it is transported along a very thin channel.

Why that is non-trivial, which in itself is a non-trivial task because we're all so immensely

good at language.

The upshot why communication along language is working so well is that the speaker is

actually hijacking part of your brain.

So when we say things, that's typically much less than we convey.

Why?

Because I can be sure that the people who hear what I say reconstruct all the things

I've left out.

Many of the things you actually reconstruct or many of the things that have 17 meanings,

you pick the one that is sensible.

And that's something we have to take into account because it's non-trivial.

If you don't understand this, then you don't understand a lot of language.

So that's what I would like you to keep your eyes open.

I've tried to convince you that even single words are difficult.

We have the problems of abstraction.

Three different language utterances mean the same thing.

Car and automobile is an example.

We have the dual problem of ambiguity where bank can mean different things.

We have to at least at some point entertain in this case both of them and then have some

kind of a process to weed out all but one.

If I say I'm sitting on, no that only works then, I cash to check at the bank.

I'm probably not talking of the geographical feature but of the financial institution because

those things to actually kind of fit together the other meaning doesn't.

And we have compositionality problems where the contribution is kind of where.

The order of constituents of language may change between languages or between language

and semantics and those kind of things.

I want to give you an example where even more comes in.

So say I meet one of you and you ask me when does the lecture begin and then I say or when's

the lecture I say the lecture begins at 11 am.

OK.

Now we understand what that is right.

The lecture is a noun phrase begins as a verb at the preposition 11 am is a complex noun

phrase all of those kind of things.

We understand this but that does only gives you part of the semantics right.

The lecture.

What does that mean?

The is something that basically presupposes meaning has to refer to something that is

exactly in this case one event.

That's just as problematic as if I say the student in the room right now.

You're going to complain why because there is one two three seven or so in the room

right.