Appeared in French Journal "T.A.Informations" 1991

1994

This is a collection of excellent papers from a workshop, chaired by the editors, held in Lugano at IDSIA, an institute of the Dalle Molle Foundation. I believe the workshop was held in September 1988, but the book is not explicit. The" formal semantics"(FS) of the title refers to the theories of NL meaning derived from model theory and in standard use in theoretical linguistics. The title (and the preface) suggest a thematic cohesion among papers that is actually lacking.

1999

The Philosophical Forum, 2003

Proceedings of the 24th annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics -, 1986

Consideration of the question of meaning in the framework of linguistics often requires an allusion to sets and other higher-order notions. The traditional approach to representing and reasoning about meaning in a computational setting has been to use knowledge representation systems that are either based on first-order logic or that use mechanisms whose formal justifications are to be provided after the fact. In this paper we shall consider the use of a higher-order logic for this task. We first present a version of definite clauses (positive Horn clauses) that is based on this logic. Predicate and function variables may occur in such clauses and the terms in the language are the typed λ-terms. Such term structures have a richness that may be exploited in representing meanings. We also describe a higher-order logic programming language, called λProlog, which represents programs as higher-order definite clauses and interprets them using a depth-first interpreter. A virtue of this language is that it is possible to write programs in it that integrate syntactic and semantic analyses into one computational paradigm. This is to be contrasted with the more common practice of using two entirely different computation paradigms, such as DCGs or ATNs for parsing and frames or semantic nets for semantic processing. We illustrate such an integration in this language by considering a simple example, and we claim that its use makes the task of providing formal justifications for the computations specified much more direct.

Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of …, 1997

I owe my thanks to a number of people, each of whom contributed in their own way towards this research and in the preparation of this document. First of all, I thank Prof. Aravind Joshi for his continued support during the period of this research. I h a ve bene ted signi cantly from his deep insights and his passion for subtle details which have made a signi cant impact on this research. I thank Prof. Mitch Marcus with whom I have had numerous \corridor conversations" that have helped shape this research. I deeply appreciate his support in the absence of Prof. Joshi, during Fall 1994. My thanks are also d u e t o P r o f. Mark Steedman whose seminar course helped me to extend the applicability of this research. I thank Steve A b n e y , Mark Liberman and John Trueswell, who as part of my committee provided insightful comments and suggestions that has improved the quality of this research. Without Yves Schabes and his dissertation, this research w ould not have been possible at all. I have bene ted a great deal from my discussions with him on many occasions. I have also used his code developed for XTAG, extensively in this research. There would beno greater injustice if I do not acknowledge the in uence the XTAG group has had on this research, besides keeping me on my toes at all times. Beth Ann Hockey and Christine Doran deserve my special thanks for putting up with my linguistic ignorance and cheering me along with my often silly ideas. Without their critical remarks, this research would have taken much longer than it has. I thank Dania and Martin for providing the many tools used in this research. I also would like to thank the XTAG elves { Heather, Laura, Susan and young Tim who cleaned up the XTAG corpus over the summer of 1995 and 1996. My special thanks to R. Chandrasekar (Mickey) for several invigorating discussions iii about my work, in particular and the eld of computer science, in general. I also thank him for giving me a chance to apply supertagging to his work and for his warm fraternal a ection that saw me through the nal stages of this work. Signi cant improvement in supertagging performance came about during the Summer of 1996, thanks to the \summer camp" team { Breck Baldwin, Christine Doran, Michael Niv and Je Reynar. I am deeply indebted to them for providing constructive criticism and setting up high standards of performance. My thanks to Martha Palmer, Tilman Becker, James Rogers for providing constructive comments during practice talks and in student-lounge discussions. I would also like to acknowledge

The paper presents aspects of PROLOG history in a three part argument: (1) the birth of an algorithm and the historical background of artificial intelligence and PROLOG and its relation with logical programming, (2) different research done on PROLOG in order to expand, adapt or transform its features for implementing different data structures and system architecture. Notably, I present the development of logical and parallel architecture (Kowalski, Clark and Gregory, 1982), hybrid systems such as POPLOG using elements of PROLOG with LISP and the use of other languages and non-logical augmentation (Mellish and Hardy, 1982) and some reflection on computer and education dealing with the definition of the user in relation to the development of micro-PROLOG (Ennals, 1982, 1984) and (3) a reflection on the transformation of the computing field and its implication for epistemic practices and professional dynamics.

4 Conclusion In the previous sections we showed that the ProPars system by using symbolic procedures is enabled to parse sentences of arbitrary length. In addition, symbolic procedures were used to store intermediate parsing results such that a syntax tree can be assembled after the parsing process has been completed. Both of these problems are not solved by other connectionist based systems.

The Iterated Romance of Syntax, 2023

One of the greatest intellectual crimes to beset us in the 20th-century was the premature death of the formalist program. The millennia old dream of solving math was never realized as our efforts fell short of our ambition. David Hilbert, with all his grace, his effulgent brilliance, his professional magnanimity, and his unflinching dedication, was left with only disgruntled disappointment. The formalist program was a noble effort, held aloft by the unyielding conviction and charisma of the foremost mathematicians of the age. This forlorn vignette is rendered at least somewhat emotionally digestible by the developments that followed. The dream of syntax is all became partially realized by the contributions of Haskell Curry, Alonzo Church, Stephen Kleene, Moses Schönfinkel and others. With their syntactic approach to mathematics, we capture the compositional beauty of infinity in our humble symbol. And thus, we compile the syntactic face of God.

2003

2011