Evaluation Order Effects in Dynamic Continuized CCG: From Negative Polarity Items to Balanced Punctuation

Combinatory Categorial Grammar\u27s (CCG; Steedman, 2000) flexible treatment of word order and constituency enable it to employ a compact lexicon, an important factor in its successful application to a range of NLP problems. However, its word order flexibility can be problematic for linguistic phenomena where linear order plays a key role. In this paper, we show that the enhanced control over evaluation order afforded by Continuized CCG (Barker & Shan, 2014) makes it possible to not only implement an improved analysis of negative polarity items in Dynamic Continuized CCG (White et al., 2017) but also to develop an accurate treatment of balanced punctuation

Fine-grained discourse structures in continuation semantics

International audienceIn this work, we are interested in the computation of logical representations of discourse. We argue that all discourse connectives are anaphors obeying different sets of constraints and show how this view allows one to account for the semantically parenthetical use of attitude verbs and verbs of report (e.g., think, say) and for sequences of conjunctions (A CONJ 1 B CONJ 2 C). We implement this proposal in event semantics using de Groote (2006)’s dynamic framework

Parameterized monads in linguistics

A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of Wolverhampton for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.This dissertation follows the formal semantics approach to linguistics. It applies recent developments in computing theories to study theoretical linguistics in the area of the interaction between semantics and pragmatics and analyzes several natural language phenomena by parsing them in these theories. Specifically, this dissertation uses parameterized monads, a particular theoretical framework in category theory, as a dynamic semantic framework to reinterpret the compositional Discourse Representation Theory(cDRT), and to provide an analysis of donkey anaphora. Parameterized monads are also used in this dissertation to interpret information states as lists of presuppositions, and as dot types. Alternative interpretations for demonstratives and imperatives are produced, and the conventional implicature phenomenon in linguistics substantiated, using the framework. Interpreting donkey anaphora shows that parameterized monads is able to handle the sentential dependency. Therefore, this framework shows an expressive power equal to that of related frameworks such as the typed logical grammar and the dynamic predicate logic. Interpreting imperatives via parameterized monads also provides a compositional dynamic semantic analysis which is one of the main approaches to analysing imperatives