Related papers: Type-theoretical natural language semantics: on th…

In compositional model-theoretic semantics, researchers assemble truth-conditions or other kinds of denotations using the lambda calculus. It was previously observed that the lambda terms and/or the denotations studied tend to follow the…

In this position paper, we propose a reasoning framework that can model the reasoning process underlying natural language inferences. The framework is based on the semantic tableau method, a well-studied proof system in formal logic. Like…

Refinement types sharpen systems of simple and dependent types by offering expressive means to more precisely classify well-typed terms. We present a system of refinement types for LF in the style of recent formulations where only canonical…

This paper proposes a way to compute the meanings associated with sentences with generic noun phrases corresponding to the generalized quantifier most. We call these generics specimens and they resemble stereotypes or prototypes in lexical…

We consider the non-deterministic extension of the call-by-value lambda calculus, which corresponds to the additive fragment of the linear-algebraic lambda-calculus. We define a fine-grained type system, capturing the right linearity…

Recent models of intensional type theory have been constructed in algebraic weak factorization systems (AWFSs). AWFSs give rise to comprehension categories that feature non-trivial morphisms between types; these morphisms are not used in…

Semantic subtyping is an approach to define subtyping relations for type systems featuring union and intersection type connectives. It has been studied only for strict languages, and it is unsound for non-strict semantics. In this work, we…

In this thesis we use quasiorders on words to offer a new perspective on two well-studied problems from Formal Language Theory: deciding language inclusion and manipulating the finite automata representations of regular languages. First, we…

This paper presents an approach to Prolog-style term encoding of typed feature structures. The type feature structures to be encoded are constrained by appropriateness conditions as in Carpenter's ALE system. But unlike ALE, we impose a…

In the quest to give a formal compositional semantics to natural languages, semanticists have started turning their attention to phenomena that have been also considered as parts of pragmatics (e.g., discourse anaphora and presupposition…

We address the problem of local type inference for a language based on System F with context-free session types. We present an algorithm that leverages the bidirectional type checking approach to propagate type information, enabling first…

The integration of lexical semantics and pragmatics in the analysis of the meaning of natural lan- guage has prompted changes to the global framework derived from Montague. In those works, the original lexicon, in which words were assigned…

We develop semantics and syntax for bicategorical type theory. Bicategorical type theory features contexts, types, terms, and directed reductions between terms. This type theory is naturally interpreted in a class of structured…

This paper addresses the problem of mapping natural language sentences to lambda-calculus encodings of their meaning. We describe a learning algorithm that takes as input a training set of sentences labeled with expressions in the lambda…

This paper presents \tdl, a typed feature-based representation language and inference system. Type definitions in \tdl\ consist of type and feature constraints over the boolean connectives. \tdl\ supports open- and closed-world reasoning…

A natural next step in the evolution of constraint-based grammar formalisms from rewriting formalisms is to abstract fully away from the details of the grammar mechanism---to express syntactic theories purely in terms of the properties of…

This paper introduces a novel type theory and logic for probabilistic reasoning. Its logic is quantitative, with fuzzy predicates. It includes normalisation and conditioning of states. This conditioning uses a key aspect that distinguishes…

In the principles-and-parameters framework, the structural features of languages depend on parameters that may be toggled on or off, with a single parameter often dictating the status of multiple features. The implied covariance between…

We investigate the possibility of modelling the syntax and semantics of natural language by constraints, or rules, imposed by the multi-dimensional type theory Nabla. The only multiplicity we explicitly consider is two, namely one dimension…

We develop a system that formally represents spatial semantics concepts within natural language descriptions of spatial arrangements. The system builds on a model of spatial semantics representation according to which words in a sentence…