Courses' slots:

Week one 14:00 - 15:30

Language and Logic advanced course:
Plurality and distributivity across language(s) and logic(s).

Teachers
  • Eytan Zweig ()
  • George Tsoulas ()

Keywords: plurality, distributivity

Abstract:

This course offers an in-depth survey of the state of the art in the research on plurality and distributivity. While logic treats distributivity as a straightforward logical property of quantifiers and predicates, natural languages present a picture both more subtle and complex. Different languages exhibit an array of strategies for the expression of distributivity and many different constraints on what can acquire a distributive interpretation in which contexts. We present a picture of the crosslinguistic variation in the expression of distributivity drawing data from languages including English, French, German, Greek, Korean, and Japanese. Attempting synthesis of insights from plural logics and from the linguistic semantics of distributivity, we will examine what is necessary for a plural logic system that will capture the nuances expressed across natural languages. The course is addressed to students with a solid grasp of basic semantics including generalised quantifier theory and basic notions of boolean algebra.

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Logic and Computation advanced course:
Game semantics and its applications.

Teacher
  • Andrzej Murawski ()
Abstract:

In recent years game semantics has emerged as a robust paradigm for giving semantics to a variety of logical systems and programming languages. Its precision in modelling has subsequently led to original applications in program analysis and model checking. This course is meant to provide a self-contained introduction to the field along with a survey of ongoing applied work.

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Logic and Computation workshop:
Logical Methods for Social Concepts.

Organizers

Course material: AquilkhanBanerjee.pdf BalbianiDitmarschSeban.pdf Broersen.pdf DegremontKurzen.pdf Dimitri.pdf EckertHerzberg.pdf GenotJacot.pdf GhoshVelazquez.pdf GierasimczukKurzenVelazquez.pdf HakliNegri.pdf LonginNguyen.pdf RousselCholvy.pdf Tuomela.pdf

External page

Abstract:

Both computer science and the social sciences are interested in concepts such as power, cooperation, responsibility, delegation, trust, reputation, convention, agreement, commitment, etc. The aim of the workshop is to study whether logical approaches developed in the multi-agent system (MAS) domain are adequate to express them in an accurate way. In particular, are existing logical approaches sufficiently expressive to capture the main features of these social concepts? Are the basic assumptions in the existing logics for MAS too strong to capture the fundamental aspects of social phenomena? Are some concepts relevant for social theory missing in these logics?

We encourage not only works focused on the technical aspects of logics for multi-agent system, but also works including multidisciplinary aspects from social sciences (e.g. economics, sociology, social philosophy) and providing a critical analysis of the existing logical frameworks for the specification of social concepts. Indeed, the workshop is intended to bring together logicians and social theorists in order to provide a better understanding of the potentialities and limitations of logical methods for the analysis of social reality.

The following are some examples of topics that are relevant for the workshop.

- Logics of individual and collective powers - Logical approaches to game theory - Public announcements logics and logics of communication - Logical approaches to trust and reputation - Logical approaches to organizational concepts (e.g. roles, responsibility, delegation) - Logics of social commitment and collective attitudes (e.g. common belief and common knowledge, collective acceptance, joint intentions)

- Logics for mechanism design

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Language and Logic introductory course:
Focus, Focus Interpretation, and Focus Sensitivity.

Teachers
  • Malte Zimmermann ()
  • Daniel Hole ()
Abstract:

The course offers an overview of standard implementations of the meaning of focus and the structural and semantic behaviour of focus-sensitive elements (quantificational adverbs, focus particles). The course integrates the discussion of empirical phenomena with recent semantic (and syntactic) theories. 1: Introduction: Focus phenomena and Alternative Semantics (Rooth 1985, 1992, Schwarzschild 1999) 2: Structured Propositions and Focus Movement (von Stechow 1991, Rooth 1996, Krifka 2006) 3: Semantic effects of explicit focus marking: Contrast, exhaustivity in clefts and Hungarian focus constructions (Horn 1981, Kiss 1998, Wedgwood 2003, Horvath 2008) 4: The semantics of focus-sensitive particles ('only', 'also', 'even') and quantificational adverbs (König 1991, Rooth 1996, Beaver & Clark 2004, Beaver, to appear) 5: Extensions and case studies: (i.) Postposed additive particles ('AUCH', 'too') as topic-sensitive expressions (Krifka 1999); (ii.) Multiple association with focus (Krifka 1992, Wagner 2007); (iii.) Particle proliferation in Southeast Asian and Dutch (Barbiers, to appear, Hole 2008).

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Logic and Computation advanced course:
Reasoning in complex theories and applications.

Teacher

Course material: sofronie-lecture-esslli-09.pdf

Abstract:

The goal of this course is to give a comprehensive, in-depth perspective on recent advances in the field of reasoning in complex logical theories, and to present the applications of these results in mathematics, formal verification and knowledge representation.

We will start by explaining the importance of logical formalization in various areas (mathematics, verification, knowledge representation, AI). We will point out the limitations of the logic formalization, as well as the necessity of developing decision procedures. We will argue, using various examples, that concrete problems often are quite heterogeneous in nature, such that combinations of reasoning tools (resp. decision procedures) for various theories might be needed in the same application. We will introduce the necessary theoretical concepts and give a survey of decidable and tractable logical theories. We will then present recent achievements which address the main problems which occur in this context, starting from SAT checking in classical logic and continuing with tests of satisfiability modulo a theory, modular reasoning in combinations of theories (under various conditions on their shared signatures) and hierarchical reasoning in theory extensions. We will present the main ideas which appeared in the literature from a unifying perspective. We will illustrate the problems and the solutions on examples from mathematics, verification and knowledge representation.

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Language and Computation workshop:
Parsing with Categorial Grammars

Organizer
  • Gerald Penn ()

External page

Keywords: categorial grammar, parsing, semantic inference

Abstract:

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.

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