This post contains course materials for my 2016 NASSLLI course, ‘Modeling questions and responses in discourse’. This course presented and compare theories of responding to questions from the perspective of both linguistics, focusing on formal pragmatics, and computer science (‘QA’). Post-hoc caveat: The state of the art in QA has drastically changed since 2016 (and was already in flux then, to some degree).
- Lecture 1: course overview, basics of questioning / QA, and kinds of questions. [Lecture 1 slides, PDF]
- Lecture 2: kinds of questions and responses; theories of question representation. [Lecture 2 slides, PDF]
- The Lambda Notebook demo of Hamblin semantics from lecture 2 is available as part of the lambda notebook, here. This requires a current version (github master) of the lambda notebook to work.
- Lecture 3: the architecture of a QA system. [Lecture 3 slides, pdf]
- Lecture 4: a dynamics for responses (part 1) [lecture 4 slides, pdf]
- Lecture 5: a dynamics for responses (part 2) [Lecture 5 slides, pdf]
- Lecture 5b: integration [Lecture 5b slides, pdf]