A Type-coherent, Expressive Representation as an Initial Step to Language Understanding

A growing interest in tasks involving language understanding by the NLP community has led to the need for effective semantic parsing and inference. Modern NLP systems use semantic representations that do not quite fulfill the nuanced needs for language understanding: adequately modeling language semantics, enabling general inferences, and being accurately recoverable. This document describes underspecified logical forms (ULF) for Episodic Logic (EL), which is an initial form for a semantic representation that balances these needs. ULFs fully resolve the semantic type structure while leaving issues such as quantifier scope, word sense, and anaphora unresolved; they provide a starting point for further resolution into EL, and enable certain structural inferences without further resolution. This document also presents preliminary results of creating a hand-annotated corpus of ULFs for the purpose of training a precise ULF parser, showing a three-person pairwise interannotator agreement of 0.88 on confident annotations. We hypothesize that a divide-and-conquer approach to semantic parsing starting with derivation of ULFs will lead to semantic analyses that do justice to subtle aspects of linguistic meaning, and will enable construction of more accurate semantic parsers.Comment: Accepted for publication at The 13th International Conference on Computational Semantics (IWCS 2019

Synthesizing Functional Reactive Programs

Functional Reactive Programming (FRP) is a paradigm that has simplified the construction of reactive programs. There are many libraries that implement incarnations of FRP, using abstractions such as Applicative, Monads, and Arrows. However, finding a good control flow, that correctly manages state and switches behaviors at the right times, still poses a major challenge to developers. An attractive alternative is specifying the behavior instead of programming it, as made possible by the recently developed logic: Temporal Stream Logic (TSL). However, it has not been explored so far how Control Flow Models (CFMs), as synthesized from TSL specifications, can be turned into executable code that is compatible with libraries building on FRP. We bridge this gap, by showing that CFMs are indeed a suitable formalism to be turned into Applicative, Monadic, and Arrowized FRP. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our translations on a real-world kitchen timer application, which we translate to a desktop application using the Arrowized FRP library Yampa, a web application using the Monadic threepenny-gui library, and to hardware using the Applicative hardware description language ClaSH.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1712.0024

Controlling Contractors with Monads for Hybrid Dynamical Systems

Physical systems with intelligent behaviors result from inter-actions of different fields: sensor networks, robotics, optimization, reasoning, etc. Rooted in this philosophy of interdisciplinary, this paper makes a connexion between hybrid dynamical systems, interval-based constraint propagation and functional programming. It shows how to build a monadic program in Haskell to control contractors (constraint propagators) for the state estimation of multi-model (hy- brid) dynamical systems, subject to partial and uncertain measurements. The example of system taken here is an elevator that can either be moving upward, downward or stopped. The altitude is measured directly and the estimation problem is simply to track its motion. The purpose of the Haskell library is to offer both a high-level and flexible framework for building propagation strategies based on user knowledge or user requirements.L'élaboration de sytèmes autonomes est le résultat d'interactions entre différents domaines: réseau de capteurs, robotique, optimisation, raison- nement automatique, etc. Cet article, ancré dans cette philosophie pluridis- ciplinaire, montre une connexion entre les systèmes hybrides dynamiques, la propagation de contraintes sur intervalles et la programmation fonctionnelle. Plus précisément, il montre comment concevoir un programme monadique en Haskell pour contrôler les contracteurs (propagateurs de contraintes) permet- tant l'estimation d'état de systèmes dynamiques multi-modéles (hybrides), su- jets à des mesures partielles et incertaines. L'exemple de système pris ici est un ascenseur qui peut monter, descendre ou être stopé. L'altitude est mesurée directement et le problème d'estimation est simplement de suivre son mouve- ment. L'objectif de la bibliothéque Haskell est d'offrir un cadre à la fois flexible et de haut niveau pour construire des stratégies de propagation basées sur les connaissances ou les pré-requis de l'utilisateur

Monadic Functional Reactive Programming

Functional Reactive Programming (FRP) is a way to program reactive systems in functional style, eliminating many of the problems that arise from imperative techniques. In this paper, we present an alternative FRP formulation that is based on the notion of a reactive computation: a monadic computation which may require the occurrence of external events to continue. A signal computation is a reactive computation that may also emit values. In contrast to signals in other FRP formulations, signal computations can end, leading to a monadic interface for sequencing signal phases. This interface has several advantages: routing is implicit, sequencing signal phases is easier and more intuitive than when using the switching combinators found in other FRP approaches, and dynamic lists require much less boilerplate code. In other FRP approaches, either the entire FRP expression is re-evaluated on each external stimulus, or impure techniques are used to prevent redundant re-computations. We show how Monadic FRP can be implemented straightforwardly in a purely functional way while preventing redundant re-computations