Relevant Logic Revisited

In 1992 I tried to read Anderson and Belnalp's book `Entailment, Vol. 1: The Logic of Relevance and Necessity' (1976) to help Maria Claudia Mere with her PhD thesis. 

She completed her work `Logicas Relevantes: formalismo e semantica'
in 1993, and I was a bit disappointed with relevant logics. I was hoping for prettier mathematics, cleaner proof-theory and clearer philosophical views. Now that my standards have changed a little, maybe I should re-read this work.

Maude for Textual Entailment

This is Maude Fealy, a star of silent movies, and no, I don't mean this Maude, but instead Maude the rewriting system developed by Messeguer and others, first at SRI then at Illinois.

They say in their Maude webpage "Maude is a high-performance reflective language and system supporting both equational and rewriting logic specification and programming for a wide range of applications."

Vivek Nigam and I have thought that it should be easy to use rewriting logic to prove formally entailment and contradiction of formulas arising from text, using the PARC's  Bridge system, as a black box. We wrote a preliminary note, and I talked about it at LSFA 2014.

The note `Towards a Rewriting Framework for Textual Entailment' is available, as are the Maude files used.

Transfer vs. Glue Semantics?

The short version of this post is Glue=principled, based on Linear Logic, Transfer=efficient, based on (linear) Rewriting.

But much, much more can and should be written.

The reason for the post is collect a few references. And to post a new(ish)  paper of Dick Crouch, which shows that Transfer semantics is totally independent of the grammatical theory that it originates from,  Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG). The paper is Transfer Semantics for the Clear Parser, it was presented at Natural Language and Computer Science (NLCS 2014), the workshop I organized with Larry Moss and Christian Retore as part of the Vienna Summer of Logic.

There are also two other papers on Transfer Semantics, these use LFG and the the XLE parser. The  papers can be found in this blog post. One shows how to construct transfer semantics from f-structures, the other how to rewrite transfer semantics into knowledge representation. Now I need to add the references for Glue Semantics.

Remembrance of things long past

 I first talked in Nuance on October 26th  2012 about my work on NL-based KR representations at PARC  and how I wanted to improve it. 
I first gave a talk similar to this in Feb 2010 at SRI (slides in slideshare, paper).
Then I tried to think a bit more along the lines of expressivity vs. complexity, following the work of Larry Moss. 
First at Stanford Workshop on Natural Logic, Proof Theory, and Computational Semantics, March 2011 and  then at RAIN in Austin, Texas, June 2012, when I called it Little Engines of Inference. Further I have written a paper for CommonSense2013, Contexts for Quantification.

Logic in the Pub, again?

Can repetition of non-information create new information?
My intuition was to say NO WAY! But look below...

Rejected!

I must be really good at this. It's only the 31st March and I already have  three papers rejected this year! Maybe I'm taking too seriously the mantra of Silicon Valley "Fail Fast, Fail often".

This doesn't worry me very much. I know the three papers are good, interesting work. Maybe I need to explain myself a little better, maybe I need some more time to check the literature , maybe I need to talk about it more, to see what is it that people don't understand. I can do it, I do some of my best work when people don't believe what I'm saying.

Seriously this is not as bad as having rejected 21 other groups of people. This was news to me, in such large numbers. And I don't like it at all.

(I also had three papers already accepted this year, so maybe I shouldn't complaint!)

Browsing OpenwordNet-PT and other things I need to remember

I don't know how everybody else copes, but I confess that I am overwhelmed by the amount of work I need to do and by the fact that my tools keep failing me. The newest one is Firefox bookmarks, that after years of doing my bidding now decided to revolt and not do what I tell them...
The other one is my cellphone which says that it needs more memory and it won't do a thing unless I change it or do something about the "stuff" that accumulated over the years.
Anyways, while Blogger still does what I tell it, here's the link to the new interface to the OpenWordNet-PT. This is a brilliant piece of code by Fabricio Chalub that is helping an awful lot with the cleaning up of the data.

The other three links  I need to find easily are the conferences am trying to organize this year:

1. WOLLIC 2015, Bloomington, Indiana (deadline this weekend!)
2. NLCS 2015, Kyoto, Japan, 
3. ESSLLI workshop on Logic and Probabilistic Methods for Dialog

For the talks to give and the other zillions of deadlines I need to keep track of, I will have to rely on the adrenalin.