Related papers: Pragmatic Side Effects
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…
Computer programs are often factored into pure components -- simple, total functions from inputs to outputs -- and components that may have side effects -- errors, changes to memory, parallel threads, abortion of the current loop, etc. We…
"Natural languages are programming languages for minds." Can we or should we take this slogan seriously? If so, how? Can answers be found by looking at the various "dynamic" treatments of natural language developed over the last decade or…
Algebraic effects are computational effects that can be described with a set of basic operations and equations between them. As many interesting effect handlers do not respect these equations, most approaches assume a trivial theory,…
This paper is a reflexion on the computability of natural language semantics. It does not contain a new model or new results in the formal semantics of natural language: it is rather a computational analysis of the logical models and…
This dissertation is concerned with the study of program equivalence and algebraic effects as they arise in the theory of programming languages. Algebraic effects represent impure behaviour in a functional programming language, such as…
Making a linguistic theory is like making a programming language: one typically devises a type system to delineate the acceptable utterances and a denotational semantics to explain observations on their behavior. Via this connection, the…
Higher-order representations of objects such as programs, proofs, formulas and types have become important to many symbolic computation tasks. Systems that support such representations usually depend on the implementation of an intensional…
Notions of computation can be modelled by monads. Algebraic effects offer a characterization of monads in terms of algebraic operations and equational axioms, where operations are basic programming features, such as reading or updating the…
Effectful programs interact in ways that go beyond simple input-output, making compositional reasoning challenging. Existing work has shown that when such programs are ``separate'', i.e., when programs do not interfere with each other, it…
We consider a programming language that can manipulate both classical and quantum information. Our language is type-safe and designed for variational quantum programming, which is a hybrid classical-quantum computational paradigm. The…
Recent advances in Bayesian probability theory and its application to cognitive science in combination with the development of a new generation of computational tools and methods for probabilistic computation have led to a 'probabilistic…
An algebraic method is used to study the semantics of exceptions in computer languages. The exceptions form a computational effect, in the sense that there is an apparent mismatch between the syntax of exceptions and their intended…
This thesis revolves around an area of computer science called "semantics". We work with operational semantics, equational theories, and denotational semantics. The first contribution of this thesis is a study of the commutativity of…
Semantic parsing is a means of taking natural language and putting it in a form that a computer can understand. There has been a multitude of approaches that take natural language utterances and form them into lambda calculus expressions --…
In this paper, we study a functional programming approach to natural language semantics, allowing us to increase the expressiveness of a more traditional denotation style. We will formalize a category based type and effect system to…
We extend the {\lambda}-calculus with constructs suitable for relational and functional-logic programming: non-deterministic choice, fresh variable introduction, and unification of expressions. In order to be able to unify…
The ability to accurately interpret implied meanings plays a crucial role in human communication and language use, and language models are also expected to possess this capability. This study demonstrates that providing language models with…
The paper reconceptualizes pragmatics not as a subordinate, third dimension of meaning, but as a dynamic interface through which language operates as a socially embedded tool for action. With the emergence of large language models (LLMs) in…
Many theories of semantic interpretation use lambda-term manipulation to compositionally compute the meaning of a sentence. These theories are usually implemented in a language such as Prolog that can simulate lambda-term operations with…