Existential Change Verbs?

If you find a sentence like "Our reservations were cancelled by the hotel computing system" you need to know that, whether you name them or not, whether you're using bag-of-words or not, someone's reservations do not exist anymore in that hotel.

Patricia Amaral, Cleo Condoravdi, Annie Zaenen and I worked a little on the problem of classifying verbs that exhibit this "existential change" effect. We submitted a paper to a context workshop in 2008, it was accepted, but no one had time to travel for that conference. Now we submitted it again to ONTOBRAS-MOST 2012 in Recife.

OpenWN-PT is online!!

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.

We call it OpenWN-PT because there are some other efforts at Portuguese WordNets, including the MultiWordNet-Portuguese, the Portuguese Wordnet of P. Marrafa and the Brazilian Portuguese WordNet of Bento Dias-da-Silva. Ours is small, but downloadable and improvable.

This week we heard from Francis Bond that this has been incorporated into Francis' project,  Open Multilingual Wordnet (link below) which makes it online, searchable and "linked" to SUMO, which I worked on with  Adam Pease.

YAY!!! Great news guys, many thanks!!!

Open Multilingual Wordnet

 

Language and Natural Reasoning

Annie has created a new group in CSLI, Language and Natural Reasoning.

I guess I need to justify my participation, so I need to write up my RAIN (Reasoning and Interaction as NASSLLI) talk: Little engines of Inference: Contexts for Quantification.

Women in Logic? Yes!

Catarina Dutilh Novaes had the clever  idea of making a list of women working in logic.

But the list was not alphabetical (which made it difficult to know if you were in there) and it had no webpages for the women there (which made it difficult to read their work).

So I've asked Anna Crouch to find out the webpages for the women in the list and to make it  alphabetical. 

Ruth Barcan Marcus in 1943 and a "year of zipping and unzipping snowsuits" to illustrate.

Fuzzy Sets in Brazil

Apostolos Syropoulos and I have managed to submit a paper  on (Dialectica-style) Fuzzy Topological Systems for the

II CBSF - Second Brazilian Congress on Fuzzy Systems

 

Thanks Elaine Pimentel for the photo of Natal!

Computing in Tunisia?

 Prof. Fairouz Kamareddine (Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, UK) invited me to the program committee of this new conference in Tunisia,

International Symposium on Symbolic Computation in Software Science,
December 15-17 2012
Gammarth, Tunisia

I sure would like to go to Tunisia.

IMPORTANTS DATES:
August 23, 2012: Paper title and abstract deadline
August 30, 2012: Full paper deadline (firm)
October 30, 2012: Author notification
November 30, 2012: Final version deadline (firm)
December 15-17, 2012: Symposium

Lambek Calculus and Dialectica Categories

Many years ago I wrote a short note on a categorical model of the Lambek Calculus using the Dialectica construction. The note is imaginatively called A Dialectica Model of the Lambek Calculus.

This is interesting for a couple of reasons. First because the original dialectica constructions are all commutative and the Lambek calculus is definitely not commutative.
Second because the route I took to start from the Lambek calculus and end up in classical propositional logic, I have not seen taken since. It was based on previous work of Yetter and independently Morrill-Hepple-Moortgat and it's surprising to me that others have not decided to use it.

 I talked about it at both the Durham Symposium and the Amsterdam Colloquium. But with job moves, house moves,  broken computers and passwords-that-don't-work, I had not a single copy of my own paper. So I wrote to the nice guys in Amsterdam and thanks to wonderful Peter van Ormondt, Paul Dekker, Maria Aloni and Johan van Benthem I now have at least a scanned copy of  Peter's volume. Thank you guys!

So if like me, you want to read it, you can check it out at the place provided by the also nice guys  at Slideshare. Google Docs doesn't allow you to upload a 3.5MB scanned file, but Slideshare does. On the other hand, I did have a postscript/pdf  draft version that might be easier to read.