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!
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