Language and Computation workshop:
Parsing with Categorial Grammars

• Gerald Penn ()

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Keywords: categorial grammar, parsing, semantic inference

Among computational linguists, there has been an enormous resurgence of interest recently in parsing with categorial grammars, both because of their extreme lexicalism and because of their well-defined connection to interpretable semantic terms. The recent work of Clarke, Curran and others on Combinatory Categorial Grammars, and of Moot, Baldridge and others on multimodal extensions of categorial grammar, in particular, has produced a collection of efficient and expressive parsing tools that have only just begun to make an impact on tasks such as the Pascal RTE challenge. As the CL community attempts to push the state of the art from mere syntactic annotation into parsers that actually allow for semantic inference, CG's position can only improve. At the same time, there is no shortage of variations on "categorial grammar," and there has not to date been a great deal of communication between the adherents of these various strands on their relative linguistic or semantical merits, nor on more technical concerns of algorithm design and numerical parametrization.

The aim of this workshop is to bring researchers in these various strands to share and assess their progress in the spirit of promoting categorial grammar's overall advancement. ESSLLI has a long and distinguished history of offering CG courses and workshops, most recently Glyn Morrill's course on Type-Logical Grammar (2007), but these have typically mixed lectures on connections to linguistic theory with more formal lectures on parsing and tractability within one strand of scholarship. The focus of this workshop, however, will be squarely on the formal / computational side, with the intention of representing work across all variations of categorial grammars.