On Partee’s “Noun Phrase Interpretation and Type-Shifting Principles”

Montague’s classic article “The Proper Treatment of Quantification in Ordinary English” (PTQ, 1973) treated all NP occurrences as quantificational. Partee’s article “Noun Phrase Interpretation and Type-Shifting Principles” (1987) reconciles PTQ’s uniform quantificational strategy with the older distinction between three NP types: entities, predicates and quantifiers. On top of this distinction, Partee introduces operators that allow shifting the denotation of an NP to a different type than the one it is initially assigned. Using these type-shifters, one and the same NP may receive each of the three interpretations. In addition to this synthesis of previous approaches, Partee’s article contains a rather elaborate analysis of predicative NPs, as well as insightful hints about the treatment of definite NPs, nominalization phenomena, plural, mass and generic NPs, and the mathematical principles underlying type-shifting. At a more global level, Partee’s article marks a methodological transition in formal semantics, highlighting general principles that are relevant to different languages and to different linguistic frameworks, rather than technicalities of artificial language fragments. This general account and the new ways it opened for semantic theory, together with the paper’s lucid and friendly style, have made “Noun Phrase Interpretation and Type-Shifting Principles” one of the modern classics in formal semantics. After some necessary background on NPs in PTQ, this review covers the main innovations in Partee’s article, and comments on the work and its influence

Communication-based cooperative tasks: how the language expressiveness affects reinforcement learning

3noWe consider a cooperative multi-agent system in which cooperation may be enforced by communication between agents but in which agents must learn to communicate. The system consists of a game in which agents may move in a 2D world and are given the task of reaching specified targets. Each agent knows the target of another agent but not its own, thus the only way to solve the task is for the agents to guide one another using communication and, in particular, by learning how to communicate. We cast this game in terms of a partially observed Markov game and show that agents may learn policies for moving and communicating in the form of a neural network by means of reinforcement learning. We investigate in depth the impact on the learning quality of the expressiveness of the language, which is a function of vocabulary size, number of agents and number of targets.reservedmixedTalamini, Jacopo; Medvet, Eric; Bartoli, AlbertoTalamini, Jacopo; Medvet, Eric; Bartoli, Albert

On Partee’s “Noun Phrase Interpretation and Type-Shifting Principles”

Montague’s classic article “The Proper Treatment of Quantification in Ordinary English” (PTQ, 1973) treated all NP occurrences as quantificational. Partee’s article “Noun Phrase Interpretation and Type-Shifting Principles” (1987) reconciles PTQ’s uniform quantificational strategy with the older distinction between three NP types: entities, predicates and quantifiers. On top of this distinction, Partee introduces operators that allow shifting the denotation of an NP to a different type than the one it is initially assigned. Using these type-shifters, one and the same NP may receive each of the three interpretations. In addition to this synthesis of previous approaches, Partee’s article contains a rather elaborate analysis of predicative NPs, as well as insightful hints about the treatment of definite NPs, nominalization phenomena, plural, mass and generic NPs, and the mathematical principles underlying type-shifting. At a more global level, Partee’s article marks a methodological transition in formal semantics, highlighting general principles that are relevant to different languages and to different linguistic frameworks, rather than technicalities of artificial language fragments. This general account and the new ways it opened for semantic theory, together with the paper’s lucid and friendly style, have made “Noun Phrase Interpretation and Type-Shifting Principles” one of the modern classics in formal semantics. After some necessary background on NPs in PTQ, this review covers the main innovations in Partee’s article, and comments on the work and its influence