Computational Semantics With Functional Programming
Stc
Date: 2009-03-12
Time: 11:45
Room: BBL room 471
Speaker: Jan van Eijck (UU, CWI)
Title: Computational Semantics with Functional Programming
Abstract
Almost forty years ago Richard Montague proposed to analyse natural
language with the same tools as formal languages. In particular, he
gave formal semantic analyses of several interesting fragments of
English in terms of typed logic. This led to the development of
Montague grammar as a particular style of formal analysis of natural
language.
Pure functional programming languages are in fact implementations of
the typed lambda calculus, and implementing a Montague style fragment
of English in Haskell is a breeze. In the talk we will first explain the
program of Montague style natural language analysis, and next show
how this can be carried out with functional programming.
Examples will be taken from a textbook on computational semantics,
"Computational Semantics with Functional Programming" that is due to
appear with Cambridge University Press. A draft version of the book
is available from:
http://www.cwi.nl/~jve/cs/
