When I was still at PARC -- 2008 seems an awful long time ago now -- I invited
Patricia Amaral, then a recently graduated research student to come and visit us for a short while. She was applying to be a research assistant in Linguistics, Stanford and being in Palo Alto a little earlier was a good idea. It was lucky that the Gulbekian Foundation agreed too. We wanted to work on improving the system Bridge (about which I will write informally some other day, but an official description can be found in
PARC's Bridge and Question Answering System and a personal preliminary take can be found
here).
Being a latecomer to computational linguistics and perhaps a bit too optimistic about research, I always have dozens of ideas of things I want to get done, but little ability to predict the time that it takes to get those things done. In this case, however, everything worked well. Patricia got the hang of the system very quickly and soon enough made gigantic progress on the issue I wanted to deal with.
Despite our claims in
Preventing Existence (and despite the beautiful algorithm that Rowan, Cleo and Lauri described in
Computing Relative Polarity for Textual Inference) the Bridge system could, at that stage, only deal with logical contexts introduced by verbs with a full complement phrase. So something like
Ed knew that Mary arrived would be fine, a logical context would be created with the right polarity, but
Ed knew of Mary's arrival would not create a logical context. (The Bridge system works with full deep LFG parses of sentences and it easier to mark the complemented verbs.)
Thus my goal for the work with Patricia was the extension of the marking of verbs that introduce context, from the ones with full complement to ones that were simply directly transitive. As usual the problem was much harder than I expected and Patricia, at the end of her stay, gave us a huge presentation with millions of issues and a possible classification that would be a first stab at solving the original problem.
This was written up in a paper (by Patricia, myself,
Cleo Condoravdi and
Annie Zaenen) submitted to the
workshop on contexts associated with ECAI2008. The paper accepted, but none of us could attend. So we withdraw the paper, hoping to improve it.
Very recently I took the initiative of re-submitting the paper to
ONTOBRAS2012 in Recife, Brazil, as I had hoped to go visit some friends there. But this was not possible, so the paper, again accepted, had to be withdrawn. Again.
The newly named
Where's the meeting that was cancelled? paper seems a bit unlucky, but the work is very cool. Patricia came up with this idea of treating verbs that change existential commitments as pre and post conditions reminiscent of
Hoare's logic. This connection is hinted at in the paper, but not pursued, as the need for classification large-scale was definitely more important then. Someone should work on this, though.
(Meanwhile together with Lottie Price and Tracy King, I worked a little on nouns that introduce logical contexts, cf.
Contexts Inducing Nouns.)
Since I am fed up with having to google these two whenever I need to explain to someone why my plans are possible, albeit non-trivial, here they are:
Being too busy with the new job to write anything here.
It doesn't make sense, but it's the second time that it happens to me.
I was looking for the data on previous IMLA workshops, as we need to organize the new one, the 6th IMLA, which is happening in Rio de Janeiro, in April 2013, as part of 4th Unilog.
I guess the question can be taken as both why constructive?, if we like modal logics, but also as why modal?, if we favor constructive logic. (some might even ask why logic at all?, but we won't go there...)
For a fair number of years now I have been working on modalities in constructive logics and type theories. This started with the realization that the Linear Logic "of course" exponential connective corresponds to an S4-box operator (1992), which became my paper with Gavin Bierman On an Intuitionistic Modal Logic, Studia Logica (65):383-416, 2000.
Elaine wanted to discuss some more mathematical ideas that she might (or not) want to talk to her students about. Sitting in the several planes that it took me to get home, I made a preliminary list of things that I wanted to talk to her about.
de Paiva, Valeria, and Alexandre Rademaker. 2012. “Revisiting a Brazilian WordNet”. In Proceedings of Global Wordnet Conference. Matsue: Global Wordnet Association.more
Actually, it is the continuation of "Logics and Ontologies for Portuguese" which started in July, 2011.
Together with Alexandre Rademaker and Gerard de Melo I have been working on a version of WordNet for Portuguese that is open, downloadable and modifiable by all. The paper was called "Revisiting a Brazilian WordNet" and it appeared in the Proceedings of Global Wordnet Conference.
Annie has created a new group in CSLI, Language and Natural Reasoning.
Catarina Dutilh Novaes had the clever idea of making a list of women working in logic.
I should be an awful lot better at explaining hard stuff than I am. This is because before starting mathematics I had one year of journalism and half a year of law in college. Long story, don't ask.(oddly enough, this hasn't helped me much.)
The Infinite Possibilities Conference (IPC) is a national conference that is designed to promote, educate, encourage and support minority women interested in mathematics and statistics.
I've been invited to give a talk at
Natasha Alechina and I organized this meeting on
So I have been helping to write a twinning logic research project between Brazil and Europe, in the shape of Portugal, Italy, Romania and Israel(!?...).
