Great job Bob Rosebrugh and TAC !

Category theory is a fairly esoteric and very small branch of Mathematics, developed in strange parts of the world, like Cambridge, UK and Sydney, Australia. OK, this was news to me when I moved to the USA in 1998, but I guess this is how it's perceived over here.

But small branch or not, category theorists have been doing a great job of having an electronic and free open access journal since 1995 TAC: Theory and Applications of Categories. This year the AMS decided to invite Bob Rosebrugh its managing editor to write about it in the appropriated titled column Scripta Manent:  written words endure. We can read about it here.

I am very proud to be one of the editors of TAC since 2004. Congrats all around, but to Bob especially!

Where's the meeting that was cancelled? once again...

 Somewhat old news: the paper with Patricia, Cleo and Annie ("Where's the meeting that was cancelled?") was accepted for the COLING workshop on Cognitive Aspects of the Lexicon as a poster. The reviewers don't seem to agree with me that inferential aspects are the main cognitive issue that the lexicon needs to address, but they found the work intriguing enough to accept it for the workshop. Good. There are lots of inferential aspects to the lexicon, we only touched some in the paper, which continues the work on Computing Relative Polarity for Textual Inference,  Context Inducing Nouns and (the recently blogged about) Simple and Phrasal Implicatives. (I  know  Lauri and/or Annie must have written about the work on inferential aspects of adjectives/adverbs, but I don't know where.) Anyway this project is big and there is lots still to do and it would be good to get  lexicographers and others excited about it.

Many thanks to my friend and collaborator Gerard de Melo for presenting the poster in Mumbai, India. There, apart from his invited tutorial, he also presented our small work together on a Brazilian Portuguese Open WordNet, which deserves a post of its own, since it's kind of stuck.

Picture of Rajhastan from my friend Sara Kalvala.

Constructive Modal Logic for Walter's Fest

My friends are very productive. Every day I get messages from Academia.edu or ResearchGate saying that Prof X added 21 papers, Dr Y added 11, your friend Z added 14, and so on. The messages keep asking where are my papers...

Oh well, I guess I need to write them.

But there are a few that I have written and that given my password problems in Birmingham I have not been able to add to my webpage. And there are some that I've written but I don't think I closed the problem to my satisfaction. I wish I could get some young folks excited about those problems. And I wish I could get myself organized to write more. and better. After all, this is the only good thing about getting old, you can get better at doing the things you like doing. Which does not mean that you do get better, of course. But we can try...

Anyways, here is a paper written for the volume in honor of Walter Carnielli's 60th birthday. Walter is a good friend, we have not worked together so far, but one of these days we will.

This paper falls in the class of stuff not finished to my satisfaction, so I think I will write a nasty review of it, in the next blog post. It's called "Basic Constructive Modality"

State Oriented Linear Logic: for Hermann's birthday

Early last year I was invited to contribute to a volume celebrating Hermann Haeusler's 50th birthday. Hermann is a good friend and collaborator of mine and it's always fun to think of stuff that we have done together.

In particular many  moons ago, when Marcelo Correa was his phd student, we wrote a paper together A Dialectica Model of State. (Correa, Haeusler and de Paiva) which appeared in CATS'96, Computing: The Australian Theory Symposium Proceedings, Melbourne, Australia, January 1996, and which we never got around to publishing in a journal. 
Since I also had a phd student (Alex Tucker, in Birmingham) who did some work on this problem  but decided to quit the doctoral programme, just after getting a paper (Categorical Modelling of a State Oriented version of Linear Logic), in the Student Session of ESSLLI 1998, this seemed an ideal work to try to bring to the table as a present for Hermann.

Here's the newer version of the paper (Linear Logic Model of State Revisited), it's still very rough, I haven't had the time to make sure that I read all the good work that came after it, maybe I should try to talk about it in the BACAT meetings...

Simple Implicatives

Lauri Karttunen visited Nuance this week and gave a short (but very nice) talk about simple and phrasal implicatives.

Implicatives, as you can see in the paper, are clever bits of language (single words or short expressions) that allow some immediate reasoning to be part of the understanding of the language: Think the difference between

"Kim forgot to close the window" (the window is open) vs. "Kim forgot that she closed the window" (the window is closed).

His  data for the paper is here and the written paper is here.

I will ask if I can post his slides too. So I finally asked (03/15/2013) and here are Lauri's very clear slides.

I'm really happy  that Annie invited me to be part of the Language and Natural Reasoning group of CSLI with them.

New Orleans: Here we go...

Larry Moss and myself decided to organize a workshop on Natural Language and Computer Science (NLCS) at LiCS 2013 and the workshop has been accepted, yay!!

We say the formal tools coming from logic and category theory are important in natural language semantics and in computational semantics. And that work arising from Natural Language applications has some far-reaching developments on theoretical computer science. While we both believe very much in making bridges between the usual LiCS community and the Natural Language Semantics community, we don't know how many other people think that these two groups of people have lots to say to each other. We shall see...


In any case, we know this will be a lot of fun in New Orleans!

CSL twenty years later...

It is rather nice to have been invited to the programme committee of CSL (Computer Science Logic) in Turin or Torino, Italy, almost exactly twenty years after I went to one of their first meetings.  I misremembered slightly and thought that San Miniato was in 1993, but it was in 1992. I loved the conference and made many friends, it's rather nice to be part of their programme committee this time.


Thank you for the invitation Simona Ronchi Della Rocca!