Related papers: Pragmatic Side Effects
Many different systems with explicit substitutions have been proposed to implement a large class of higher-order languages. Motivations and challenges that guided the development of such calculi in functional frameworks are surveyed in the…
Pragmatics is core to natural language, enabling speakers to communicate efficiently with structures like ellipsis and anaphora that can shorten utterances without loss of meaning. These structures require a listener to interpret an…
I present a formal connection between algebraic effects and game semantics, two important lines of work in programming languages semantics with applications in compositional software verification. Specifically, the algebraic signature…
We present a system to translate natural language sentences to formulas in a formal or a knowledge representation language. Our system uses two inverse lambda-calculus operators and using them can take as input the semantic representation…
Language sciences rely less and less on formal syntax as their base. The reason is probably its lack of psychological reality, knowingly avoided. Philosophers of science call for a paradigm shift in which explanations are by mechanisms, as…
We present a modification of the superposition calculus that is meant to generate consequences of sets of first-order axioms. This approach is proven to be sound and deductive-complete in the presence of redundancy elimination rules,…
The relationship between communicated language and intended meaning is often probabilistic and sensitive to context. Numerous strategies attempt to estimate such a mapping, often leveraging recursive Bayesian models of communication. In…
To support the understanding of declarative probabilistic programming languages, we introduce a lambda-calculus with a fair binary probabilistic choice that chooses between its arguments with equal probability. The reduction strategy of the…
We introduce the abstract notions of "monadic operational semantics", a small-step semantics where computational effects are modularly modeled by a monad, and "type-and-effect system", including "effect types" whose interpretation lifts…
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…
We present a framework, named the Montagovian generative lexicon, for computing the semantics of natural language sentences, expressed in many sorted higher order logic. Word meaning is depicted by lambda terms of second order lambda…
The idea of using unfolding as a way of computing a program semantics has been applied successfully to logic programs and has shown itself a powerful tool that provides concrete, implementable results, as its outcome is actually source…
A comparison of Landin's form of lambda calculus with Church's shows that, independently of the lambda calculus, there exists a mechanism for converting functions with arguments indexed by variables to the usual kind of function where the…
We study the interpretation of the lambda-calculus in a framework based on tropical mathematics, and we show that it provides a unifying framework for two well-developed quantitative approaches to program semantics: on the one hand program…
Emerging computational paradigms, such as probabilistic and hybrid programming, introduce new primitive operations that often need to be combined with classic programming constructs. However, it still remains a challenge to provide a…
The development of programming languages can be quite complicated and costly. Hence, much effort has been devoted to the modular definition of language features that can be reused in various combinations to define new languages and…
We introduce a new diagrammatic notation for representing the result of (algebraic) effectful computations. Our notation explicitly separates the effects produced during a computation from the possible values returned, this way simplifying…
Sarcasm is a pragmatic phenomenon in which speakers convey meanings that diverge from literal content, relying on an interaction between semantics and prosodic expression. However, how these cues jointly contribute to the recognition of…
We show how to smoothly incorporate in the object-oriented paradigm constructs to raise, compose, and handle effects in an arbitrary monad. The underlying pure calculus is meant to be a representative of the last generation of OO languages,…
We present a novel approach to construction of a formal semantics for a programming language. Our approach, using a parametric denotational semantics, allows the semantics to be easily extended to support new language features, and…