Logics and Ontologies for Natural Language 2014

Last Monday was our workshop LogOnto2014, associated with FOIS 2014. It really worked well, as they say here, "Bombou mesmo". One of the best attended workshops (there were five workshops) and great discussions. Nicholas Asher, one of the keynote speakers of the conference FOIS, stayed for most of the workshop and made things lively. Laure Vieu, the FOIS 2014 general chair had to give a talk for her collaborator,  Alexandra Arapinis, as the AirFrance workers' strike made Alexandra one day late for the conference. I opened the workshop explaining that what we originally meant as a small gathering of our very disperse group, had snowballed into a fairly sizeable workshop. But I had no clue on how big it had really become. Very nice!

The building of the FGV in downtown Rio was also very nice, well-worth getting there early to see the "cidade" waking up.   My opening slides are here. Alexandre will upload all slides and papers in due course on the program page.

Formal Ontology Meets Industry

The acronym doesn't work too well in Portuguese: FOMI is how we say "hunger", in Rio.  And the word has all kinds of bad connotations, none of the good ones that it  can have in English. The meeting was small, but fun, and the conversation during, and after the talk, was lively.

I confess that presenting our small paper wasn't half as bad as I had imagined. Different communities, different styles. Here are my slides.

The last talk of the FOIS conference was very much connected, or so I thought. Interesting work from New Zealand, "Crowdsourcing Ontology Content and Curation: The Massive Ontology Interface,  Samuel Sarjant, Catherine Legg, Matt Stannett and Duncan Willcock", need to open USB drive and read it.

Edwardian Proofs in Salvador

In Salvador I talk to Samuel (or perhaps more precisely he talks to me) about lots of things: set theory, the axiom of choice, topological spaces, topological systems and weakenings, nearly countable cardinals and how to show inequalities between them, dialectica categories of different shapes...

This time I gave a Dept Seminar on the Curry-Howard Correspondence and why I think more than simply computer scientists, mathematicians also should be interested in Edwardian proofs and Curry-Howard.

The slides are here, as the talk was a repeat from the one in Boulder, but I will confess that I am not happy with this talk, yet. Alas, I don't know how to make it better, yet.

A Modest Proposal for Portuguese NLP (Four Years Later...)

Four years ago, in September 2010 I gave a three lectures course at EMAp, FGV, Rio de Janeiro, on what I thought one needed to do for a quick ramp up of Portuguese NLP. I had read (diagonally, of course) about many initiatives, I  tried to summarize trends and competencies. And I described the work I had done in the previous nine years at Xerox PARC on a similar project, for English and what it would take to reproduce it in Portuguese, with access to the English code base.


The slides were very preliminary, here are the first ones.

I had a great time, imagining what we could do, if we had lots of people and lots of money. It is always a good thing to give yourself free rein to imagine good outcomes. I should do more of it. Of course nothing good came out of it, in the appropriate timeframe, so I put the proposals in the backburner and got very cross with the verdict that the project was not realistic, that it was too ambitious...

Well, four years later, with no money and only the people that I managed to convince to work for fun, quite a few of the milestones envisaged are in place. This makes me proud.

The slides of a presentation at FGV after four years are here. I also tried to give a more comprehensive picture in a talk in the Dept of Informatica of PUC-Rio, slides here. This work is great fun and there are plenty of things to do, so I hope to get another post going soon with some of the further developments I would like to see.

Textual Entailment Proving LSFA 2014

The "ipe amarelo" was really in bloom in Brasilia for LSFA 2014. Had a great time with friends, old and recent ones.

Talk was too long, my bad. Slides here and the preliminary version of the paper is here.

I also gave a more leisurely presentation of this at COPPE in Rio. The slides are here. It was lovely to see old friends in the audience and to discuss with them this side of my work.


Now I wonder if we can do something much better for the ENTCS proceedings, but the deadline is quite soon and after this time in Brazil, I'm very tired and in need of a rest...

Women in Computing...

I am not big in outreach. I do care passionately for some causes (women in STEM, especially in logic is one of them) and I would love to be able to do more. But with lots of research going on, in different areas, and my pathological inability to organize myself, I find it hard and end up doing very little. Mostly only when people invite me, like for the conference Infinite Possibilities, which was really great.

So I was chuffed to be invited to be part of a roundtable on Women in Computing. Renata Wasserman invited me to the roundtable about Women in Computing that she organized as part of the celebration of 40 years of the Bacharelado em Ciencia da Computacao da USP.

I had some slides from Orna Kupferman that I knew I wanted to use, as  her "scissors diagram" is a powerful communication device. Then I asked my friends about stats from Brazil. Celina Figueiredo, Heloisa and Claudia Bauzer Medeiros, as well as Simone Martins, all had good slides and information. My own version was not as good as I wanted it to be, as I put it together in a great hurry. But altogether it was great fun meeting the "girls" and talking there. Here is a picture in the Happy Hour after the roundtable.