NLCS 2014 PROCEEDINGS: EDITOR'S PREFACE

Natural Language in Computer Science (NLCS) is a new workshop.  It started in 2013  with the aim of exploring the two-way interplay between formal tools developed in logic, category theory, and theoretical computer science on the one hand, and natural language syntax and semantics on the other. These are the preliminary proceedings articles of the second edition of the NLCS workshop, NLCS2014.

Formal tools  are important in both natural language semantics and in computational semantics. Moreover, work on these tools borrows heavily from all areas of theoretical computer science. In the other direction, applications having to do with natural language have inspired developments on the formal side. The workshop welcomes papers on both topics and has shown resonance with both kinds of work.

NLCS includes papers on a wide range of topics, too numerous to discuss or even list here.  We hope readers will enjoy the diverse mix.

To mention just one of the many themes: work  on the formalization of automated deduction for answering textual questions. This problem can be seen as connected to the work on textual inference (in the PASCAL-RTE style), and one avenue of investigation could be to adapt automated deduction from the more mathematical setting of interactive theorem provers such as HOL, Isabelle, Coq, etc.. to automatic question-answering. 

This led us to consider and eventually join forces with a similarly-themed workshop at this year's Vienna Summer of Logic, the Natural Language Services for Reasoners (NLSR) workshop.

The NLSR workshop has as its main aims to bring together groups working in natural language processing and automatic reasoning and to increase awareness of natural language techniques in automatic reasoning. This is the first time the workshop is organized and the scope is very broad as the topics of concentration include:Multilingual on-line accessible mathematical content and Formal methods and tools, especially making them more accessible to non-experts.   Running the two workshops together seemed an attractive option, given the reasonable overlap of concerns and tools.  For the NLSR papers, please see the NLSR proceedings.

We are very grateful to our invited speakers Anne Abeillé, Aarne Ranta, and Laure Vieu for joining us in this adventure of interdisciplinary work. 

We thank our fellow PC members: Robin Cooper, Christophe Fouqueré, Ian Pratt-Hartmann, and Wlodek Zadrozny.

We are looking forward to a mixed and fun meeting of ideas.