Linguistic Circle

Speaker: Katrin Schulz (University of Amsterdam)

Title: Let’s talk about patterns! The use and meaning of generic sentences

Abstract: Our ability to draw generalisations is one of our core cognitive abilities. Not only are generalisations necessary to handle the complexity of the world surrounding us, generalisations are also what enables us to make predictions about the future. They are, thereby, at the core of human decision taking and behaviour. In this talk we will look at how we communicate generalisations in language. In particular we will focus on the semantics of generic sentences. I will introduce our view on the meaning of these constructions and discuss, in view of some experimental results, challenges this approach faces. In the last part of the talk I will also discuss some applications of our view on generics to questions in AI, in particular the issue of bias in AI.

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Linguistic Circle committee