4 March: DCLRS -- Tim Fernando "Situations for Natural Language Semantics"

Dublin Computational Linguistics Research Seminar: Index of March 2009 | Dublin Computational Linguistics Research Seminar - Index of year: 2009 | Full index

Seminar Announcement:

Dublin Computational Linguistics Research Seminar
DCLRS 2008/2009
DCU DIT TCD UCD

Venue: Jonathan Swift Lecture Theatre (Arts Building 2041a)
Trinity College Dublin
Time: 16:00, Friday, March 6, 2009

Title:

Situations for Natural Language Semantics

Speaker:

Dr. Tim Fernando
Computational Linguistics Group
Trinity College Dublin

Abstract:

Situations have been claimed, most famously by Barwise and Perry 1983,
to repair certain deficiencies in the classical reduction of meaning
to truth at possible worlds. I will describe a notion of semantic
evaluation in which situations serve as both inputs and outputs. As
inputs, situations eliminate the problematic assumption of totality
distinguishing possible worlds from situations. And as outputs,
situations refine truth values to ways of being true, embodying what a
proposition is about. The semantic evaluation proposed is
non-deterministic and builds on both the propositions-as-types
paradigm from proof theory and a constraint-based conception of
temporal propositions as sets of strings (in particular, regular
languages). Semantic evaluation feeds into other information-dependent
processes such as the formation of semantic representations and
textual entailments.

Winter Schedule:

January 16 John Tait (Sunderland)
January 23 Gerhard Jaeger (Bielefeld)
January 30 Pat Healey (Queen Mary)
February 6 Sebastian Moeller [cancelled]
February 13 Alfredo Maldonado Guerra (Microsoft Dublin)
February 20 Dietmar Janetzko (NCI)
February 27 Steve Pulman (Oxford) [cancelled]
March 6 Tim Fernando (TCD)
March 13 Andreas Vlachos (Cambridge)

Spring Schedule:

April 3 Tomaz Erjavec (Institute Josef Stefan)
April 10 Public Holiday
April 17 Josef Van Genabith (DCU)
April 24 Frank Keller (Edinburgh)
May 1 held
May 8 Brian Murphy (Trento)
May 15 Kees van Deemter (Aberdeen)
May 22 Elisabeth Andre (Augsburg)

Dublin Computational Linguistics Research Seminar - Index of March 2009 | Index of year: 2009 | Full index