Mathematical Linguistics

[Review of] Barbara Hall Partee: Fundamentals of Mathematics for Linguistics, Reidel, Dordrecht 1978

by Hartmut Haberland

Nordic Journal of Linguistics 4:181-183 (1981)

Finite-state parsing of phrase-structure languages and the status of readjustment rules in grammar

by D Terence Langendoen

Linguistic Inquiry 6, pp. 533-554, 1975,

Structural descriptions for sentences generated by non-self-embedding constituent structure grammars

by D Terence Langendoen

unpublished S.B. thesis, MIT, 1961

On the inadequacy of type-3 and type-2 grammars for human languages

by D Terence Langendoen

In: Studies in Descriptive and Historical Linguistics: Festschrift for Winfred Lehmann, ed. by Paul Hopper, pp. 159-172. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1977.

English and the class of context-free languages

by D Terence Langendoen

Co-authored with Paul Postal. Computational Linguistics 10, pp. 177-181, 1984.

Fondamenti delle grammatiche adposizionali

by Federico Gobbo

L’interlinguistica come disciplina scientifica può essere ricondotta alla ricerca scientifica di Leibniz. Questo... more L’interlinguistica come disciplina scientifica può essere ricondotta alla ricerca scientifica di Leibniz. Questo articolo mostra come il percorso di ricerca di matematizzazione della conoscenza linguistica abbia una importante valenza cognitiva che viene resa esplicita tramite il formalismo delle grammatiche adposizionali.

Resumo. Interlingvistikon kiel scienca fako oni povas rilatigi al la scienca esplorado de Leibniz .Chi tiu artikolo montras kiel la esplor-itinero pri matematikigo de la lingvistika konaro havas gravan konivan valoron kiu eksplicitas per la formaligho nome adpoziciaj gramatikoj.

ZIPF'S LAW AND THE DISTRIBUTION OF WRITTEN SIGNS

by Federico Giusfredi

with Alfredo Rizza: official offprint

Adpositional Grammars. A Multilingual Grammar Formalism for NLP.

by Federico Gobbo

PhD dissertation (revised)

The Penn Lambda Calculator: Pedagogical Software for Natural Language Semantics

by Lucas Champollion

Champollion, Lucas, Joshua Tauberer, and Maribel Romero (2007). In T. Holloway King and E. M. Bender (eds.), Proceedings of the Grammar Engineering across Frameworks (GEAF) 2007 Workshop. Stanford, CA, July 13-15 2007. CSLI On-line Publications. See also the homepage of the software application described in this paper: http://www.ling.upenn.edu/lambda

This paper describes a novel pedagogical software program that can be seen as an online companion to one of the... more This paper describes a novel pedagogical software program that can be seen as an online companion to one of the standard textbooks of formal natural language semantics, Heim and Kratzer (1998). The Penn Lambda Calculator is a multifunctional application designed for use in standard graduate and undergraduate introductions to formal semantics: Teachers can use the application to demonstrate complex semantic derivations in the classroom and modify them interactively, and students can use it to work on problem sets provided by the teacher. The program supports demonstrations and exercises in two main areas: (1) performing beta reduction in the simply typed lambda calculus; (2) application of the bottom-up algorithm for computing the compositional semantics of natural language syntax trees. The program is able to represent the full range of phenomena covered in the Heim and Kratzer textbook by function application, predicate modification, and lambda abstraction. This includes phenomena such as intersective adjectives, relative clauses and quantifier raising. In the student use case, emphasis has been placed on providing "live" feedback for incorrect answers. Heuristics are used to detect the most frequent student errors and to return specific, interactive suggestions.

Lexicalized non-local MCTAG with dominance links is NP-complete

by Lucas Champollion

Champollion, Lucas (2011). Lexicalized non-local MCTAG with dominance links is NP-complete. Journal of Logic, Language, and Information 20(3):343-359. Pre-print version. Final version is available at SpringerLink: http://www.springerlink.com/content/934261u37563pv3t/.

An NP-hardness proof for non-local Multicomponent Tree Adjoining Grammar (MCTAG) by Rambow and Satta (1992), based on... more An NP-hardness proof for non-local Multicomponent Tree Adjoining Grammar (MCTAG) by Rambow and Satta (1992), based on Dahlhaus and Warmuth (1986), is extended to some linguistically relevant restrictions of that formalism. It is found that there are NP-hard grammars among non-local MCTAGs even if any or all of the following restrictions are imposed: (i) lexicalization: every tree in the grammar contains a terminal; (ii) dominance links: every tree set contains at most two trees, and in every such tree set, there is a link between the foot node of one tree and the root node of the other tree, indicating that the former node must dominate the latter in the derived tree. This is the version of MCTAG proposed in Becker et al (1991) to account for German long-distance scrambling. This result restricts the field of possible candidates for an extension of Tree Adjoining Grammar that would be both mildly context-sensitive and linguistically adequate.