Gerard de Melo got his PhD as a member of MPII's D5 in 2010. After that, he spent two years as a post-doc at ICSI Berkeley and is now an Assistant Professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing, where he is heading the Web Mining and Language Technology group. For more information, please visit http://gerard.demelo.org/.
Knowledge harvesting from the Web has evolved into a major research theme in academia as well as in industry. In this talk, I will give an overview of some less-studied semantic phenomena, describing i) how we can extract knowledge about them from text and ii) addressing the other direction, how background knowledge can aid natural language processing. Examples include adjective intensities, conventional metaphors, and textual inference problems.