NLCS 2014 PROCEEDINGS: PAPERS WITH ABSTRACTS

ABSTRACT. This paper outlines a proof-theoretic approach to developing correct and terminating monadic parsers. Using a modified realisability interpretation, we extract provably correct and terminating programs from formal proofs. If the proof system is proven to be correct, then any extracted program is guaranteed to be so. By extracting parsers, we can ensure that they are correct, complete and terminating for any input. The work is ongoing, and is being carried out in the interactive proof system M\textsc{inlog}.

ABSTRACT. This paper presents a new logical analysis of nominal comparatives (i.e. sentences as in (1)) within the Delineation Semantics (DelS) approach to gradability and comparison (Klein, 1980, among many others).

(1) More linguists came to the party than stayed home to study.

Along with the Degree Semantics (DegS) framework (see Kennedy, 1997, for a summary), DelS is one of the dominant logical frameworks for analyzing the meaning of gradable constituents of the adjectival syntactic category; however, there has been very little work done investigating the application of this framework to the analysis of gradability outside the adjectival domain. This state of affairs distinguishes the DelS framework from its DegS counterpart, where such questions have been investigated in great deal since the beginning of the 21st century. Nevertheless, it has been observed (for example, by Doetjes et al. (2011)) that there is nothing inherently adjectival about the way that the interpretations of scalar predicates are calculated in DelS, and therefore that there is enormous potential for this approach to shed light on the nature of gradability and comparison in the nominal and verbal domains. This paper gives the first attempt at realizing this potential within a Mereological extension of a (simplified) version of Klein (1980)’s system.

ABSTRACT. Pregroup grammars are introduced by Lambek in 1999 as an algebraic tool for the formal analysis of natural languages. The main focus of the present paper is placed on a special extension of this calculus known as tupled pregroup grammars. Their applications to Italian concerning different sentential structures involving clitic pronouns, relative pronouns and related phenomena are taken into consideration and the advantages of the tupled pregroup approach are shown from the point of view of both linguistic analysis and syntactic computation.

ABSTRACT. This paper attempts to explore what kind of general theory of action a notion of linguistic acts could be embedded in and tries to develop the beginnings of such a theory using type theory as the starting point. We will here only develop a non-linguistic example, although we will point out relationships to linguistic acts during the course of the paper.

ABSTRACT. The specialized language of mathematics has a number of linguistically and logically interesting features. One of them, which to our knowledge has not been systematically studied before, is the implicit dynamic introduction of function symbols, exemplified by constructs of the form "for every x there is an f(x) such that ...". We present an extension of Groenendijk and Stokhof's Dynamic Predicate Logic -- Typed Higher-Order Dynamic Predicate Logic -- which formally models this feature of the language of mathematics. Furthermore, we illustrate how the implicit dynamic introduction of function symbols is treated in the proof checking algorithm of the Naproche system.

ABSTRACT. Transfer semantics uses a rewriting (or transfer) system to map syntactic parses onto semantic representations [4, 5]. This form of semantic mapping was used to build broad coverage semantic text indexes at Powerset, and has been used in various other settings such as question answering for intelligence analysts and medical QA. It has been used for English, German [14] and Japanese [13]. However, in all these cases the transfer semantics has been applied to the output of just one kind of parser: LFG functional structures created by the XLE parser [6]. This paper describes the adaptation of transfer semantics to apply to the output of the Clear dependency parser [2].

ABSTRACT. Open-ended conceptions of time based on change and predication in natural language are analyzed through strings and records. A rudimentary system of types is provided through signatures within institutions.

ABSTRACT. This work is part of a project which goal is to understand natural language by taking dialogue as a primitive notion. For this aim, the core of our theoretical framework is a logical theory of interaction, namely Ludics. Ludics is a logical theory developed by J.Y. Girard as an achievement of both proof theoretical and computational theoretical considerations. Above all it is a theory of interaction in the sense that interaction is ontologically the primitive element of Ludics. Ludics being a logical theory, our framework is relevant for grasping logical dimensions of language, especially for studying argumentation but also divergences in dialogue as we show in this paper. In particular complementary aspects of argumentation and divergence in dialogues are modelled in a uniform way: from logics and pragmatics to semantics and syntax. Furthermore we account for several features of dialogues directly at the formal level. Therefore, we may expect a fine-grained representation of various dialogical phenomenas. More precisely we illustrate this last point by describing how different divergences in dialogue may be distinguished in our modelling.

ABSTRACT. the paper presents a proof-theoretic semantics (PTS) for intensional transitive verbs, claimed to be advantageous compared to the model-theoretic semantics (MTS) for them. The PTS evades the controversies over the truth-conditions for sentences headed by ITVs, and is relieved from the complicated ontological commitments originated from various inhabitants populating models (over which there is no consensus). The following three characteristics of ITVs are handled: 1. Admittance of non-specific objects 2. Resistance to substitutability of coextensives 3. Suspension of existential commitment The paper also considers in detail the monotonicity involved with ITVs. Finally, there is a discussion of a proof-theoretic handling of passivisation of ITVs. The paper extends work on PTS for an extensional fragment, reviewed in an appendix.

ABSTRACT. This paper studies entailments between sentences like "three boys kissed five girls" involving two or more numerically quantified noun phrases that are interpreted as expressing cumulative quantification in the sense of Scha (1984). A precise characterization of when one such sentence entails another such sentence that differs from it only in the numerals is crucially important to evaluate claims about scalar implicatures arising from the use of those sentences, as pointed out by Shimada (2014). This problem turns out to be non-trivial and surprisingly difficult. We give a characterization of these entailments for the case of sentences with two noun phrases, together with a complete axiomatization consisting of two pairs of simple inference rules. We also give some valid inference rules for sentences with three noun phrases.

ABSTRACT. In this contribution, we start form a concrete problem: the identification of argument compounds and show how their structure can be modelled on a linguistic and logical basis. This investigation is, in a first stage, restricted to arguments found in technical texts. Then, we propose a type-based syntactic analysis and the premises of a conceptual model that accounts for the logical properties of such compounds. An implementation in Dislog is presented with an indicative evaluation of the results. Dislog runs on TextCoop which is a logic-based platform we developed for discourse analysis.

ABSTRACT. We modify Buszkowski's translation of context-free grammars to Lambek categorial grammars in order to deal with Montague-style semantics properly.

ABSTRACT. According to the received view of type-logical semantics (suggested by Montague and adopted by many of his successors), the number of a semantics' basic types depends proportionally on the syntactic and lexical diversity of the modeled natural language fragment. This paper provides a counterexample to this principle. In particular, it shows that Partee's temperature puzzle from [PTQ] – whose solution is commonly taken to require a basic type for indices (for the formation of individual concepts) or for individual concepts – can be solved in the poorer type system from [EFL], which only assumes basic individuals and propositions. This result contributes to the general project of identifying the minimal semantic requirements on models for certain linguistic fragments.

ABSTRACT. Phenomena on the syntax-semantics interface of natural languages have been observed to have links with programming language semantics, namely computational effects and evaluation order. We explore this connection to be able to profit from recent development in the study of effects. We propose adopting algebraic effects and handlers as tools for facilitating a uniform and integrated treatment of different non-compositional phenomena on the syntax-semantics interface.

In our paper, we give an exposition of the framework of algebraic effects and handlers with an eye towards its applicability in computational semantics. We then present some exemplary analyses in the framework: we study the interplay of anaphora and quantification by translating the continuation-based dynamic logic of de Groote into a more DRT-like theory and we propose a treatment of overt wh-movement which avoids higher-order types in the syntax.

ABSTRACT. We consider the special case of a particularized conversational implicature which arises when one agent, A, has a a goal G and makes a statement relevant to her situation. The other agent B then says something, and an implicature arises from B's utterance which can only be understood in terms of the goal. It turns out that Hoare semantics, developed originally for proving program correctness,is relevant here.

A second point is Grice's principle of cooperation. As we are all aware, not all conversations are "fully" cooperative. For instance, an American tourist and a street hawker in India may negotiate the price of a carved elephant which the latter is offering to the former. The cooperation arises from the fact that both want the sale to take place, but there is also an opposition as the tourist wants to pay less and the hawker wants to charge more. What will each say?

The Well known come on uttered by a young man to his date, "Would like to come to my apartment and see my etchings?" provides another such case.

We suggest that a principle formulated by John Nash in his "The Bargaining Problem" provides the proper generalization for the mix of cooperation and competition which prevails in such dialogues.

ABSTRACT. We show how one can formalise quantifiers in the categorical compositional distributional model of meaning. Our model is based on the generalised quantifier theory of Barwise and Cooper. We develop an abstract compact closed semantics and instantiate it in vector spaces and in relations. The former is an example for the distributional corpus-based models of language and the latter for the truth-theoretic ones.