Natural Language and Computer Science (NLCS): what's that?

 Larry Moss (pictured above in the official department photo) and I have worked on our small workshop NLCS (Natural Language and Computer Science) for several years now. The main goal of the workshop was to introduce our friends in theoretical computer science to the extremely nice problems that NL semantics and computational linguistics throws at us, as logicians. And conversely.

The first edition of the workshop happened in New Orleans in 2013 and it was a lot of fun. As we said, when introducing the workshop, associated to LiCS 2013:

Formal tools coming from logic and category theory are important in both natural language semantics and in computational semantics. Moreover, work on these tools borrows heavily from all areas of theoretical computer science. In the other direction, applications having to do with natural language have inspired developments on the formal side. 

We were then and still are interested in work covering both directions: work in NL that is an application of work in CS and work in CS that uses the tools of NL. For that first edition of NLCS we had as Invited Speakers Robin Cooper, Ian Pratt-Hartmann, and Wlodek Zadrozny, then recently arrived at UNC, Charlotte, from IBM. Our program committee was very small, us, Annie Zaenen and Bill MacCartney. 

 Maybe the acronym wasn't a very clever idea, as baseball will always be much more popular and the National League Championship Series makes us all but unfindable in the internet.

After that we had NLCS'14, NLCS'15, NLCS'16, NLCS'18 and NLCS'19. So six workshops so far. Lots of interesting work presented. The next step is to find all the programs!

 

Kolmogorov the Genius

 

It feels a bit odd when your mathematical heroes are so far away from your usual heroes. 

Take Gentzen, for instance: maybe he was misguided, and incompetent as far as political views go and not genuinely evil. But the fact is that he was a card-carrying Nazi too and that doesn't feel good. Maybe this is compensated by Dummett being a card-carrying good guy in the fight against racism through his whole life, I don't know. But I worry that someone is going to come up with a story of hypocrisy or something. Hope not!

Meanwhile, I wonder if I am the only one noticing that Kolmogorov/Alexandrov is the biggest gay love story ever? they always met in the same holiday house for more than 40 years. and they were not coy to mention which other in all sorts of official documents. they were both married, but still, how did they manage? The Wikipedia article does point it out.

A controversial life altogether: a nobleman, with an unmarried mother who died of chilbirth, a father who disappeared in the Civil War, the Suslin affair, the Soviet honours, the dedication to teaching. and the creation of whole gigantic areas of mathematics, the engine of the transformations in our society. 

But yes, the blog post is to remind me to read properly Kolmogorov's 1925 article

• 1925. "On the principle of the excluded middle" in Jean van Heijenoort, 1967. A Source Book in Mathematical Logic, 1879–1931. Harvard Univ. Press: 414–37.

and to keep a link to the London Mathematical Society Kolmogorov Obituary, (https://londmathsoc.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1112/blms/22.1.31).

Maybe this seems crazy, but I also wanted to add here a comment about Dan Hernest recently published paper "Modal Functional Dialectica Interpretation" with Triffonov. Because they start with 

Functional interpretations, derived from Goedels's computability adaptation of Aristotle's insights...

and I wanted to know what were these  Aristotle's insights that were referred to, so I wrote to Dan. But to him it was folklore, in Romanian, via the philosopher Mircea Florian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mircea_Florian, who translated Aristotle from old Greek. So no clear reference here.

I wanted to thank Samuel Gomes da Silva for all the work together in the last ten years! It has certainly kept me going!  

Thanks also to the Logicas Brasileiras for the Carol Blasio Day! It was a blast, as it's usually the case with our antics. But more about it in the next post.