Comparing and evaluating extended Lambek calculi

Lambeks Syntactic Calculus, commonly referred to as the Lambek calculus, was innovative in many ways, notably as a precursor of linear logic. But it also showed that we could treat our grammatical framework as a logic (as opposed to a logical theory). However, though it was successful in giving at least a basic treatment of many linguistic phenomena, it was also clear that a slightly more expressive logical calculus was needed for many other cases. Therefore, many extensions and variants of the Lambek calculus have been proposed, since the eighties and up until the present day. As a result, there is now a large class of calculi, each with its own empirical successes and theoretical results, but also each with its own logical primitives. This raises the question: how do we compare and evaluate these different logical formalisms? To answer this question, I present two unifying frameworks for these extended Lambek calculi. Both are proof net calculi with graph contraction criteria. The first calculus is a very general system: you specify the structure of your sequents and it gives you the connectives and contractions which correspond to it. The calculus can be extended with structural rules, which translate directly into graph rewrite rules. The second calculus is first-order (multiplicative intuitionistic) linear logic, which turns out to have several other, independently proposed extensions of the Lambek calculus as fragments. I will illustrate the use of each calculus in building bridges between analyses proposed in different frameworks, in highlighting differences and in helping to identify problems.Comment: Empirical advances in categorial grammars, Aug 2015, Barcelona, Spain. 201

Perspectives on neural proof nets

In this paper I will present a novel way of combining proof net proof search with neural networks. It contrasts with the 'standard' approach which has been applied to proof search in type-logical grammars in various different forms. In the standard approach, we first transform words to formulas (supertagging) then match atomic formulas to obtain a proof. I will introduce an alternative way to split the task into two: first, we generate the graph structure in a way which guarantees it corresponds to a lambda-term, then we obtain the detailed structure using vertex labelling. Vertex labelling is a well-studied task in graph neural networks, and different ways of implementing graph generation using neural networks will be explored.Comment: This is an extended version of an invited talk for the workshop End-to-End Compositional Models of Vector-Based Semantic

Plurals: individuals and sets in a richly typed semantics

We developed a type-theoretical framework for natural lan- guage semantics that, in addition to the usual Montagovian treatment of compositional semantics, includes a treatment of some phenomena of lex- ical semantic: coercions, meaning, transfers, (in)felicitous co-predication. In this setting we see how the various readings of plurals (collective, dis- tributive, coverings,...) can be modelled

Hybrid Type-Logical Grammars, First-Order Linear Logic and the Descriptive Inadequacy of Lambda Grammars

In this article we show that hybrid type-logical grammars are a fragment of first-order linear logic. This embedding result has several important consequences: it not only provides a simple new proof theory for the calculus, thereby clarifying the proof-theoretic foundations of hybrid type-logical grammars, but, since the translation is simple and direct, it also provides several new parsing strategies for hybrid type-logical grammars. Second, NP-completeness of hybrid type-logical grammars follows immediately. The main embedding result also sheds new light on problems with lambda grammars/abstract categorial grammars and shows lambda grammars/abstract categorial grammars suffer from problems of over-generation and from problems at the syntax-semantics interface unlike any other categorial grammar

Proof nets for display logic

This paper explores several extensions of proof nets for the Lambek calculus in order to handle the different connectives of display logic in a natural way. The new proof net calculus handles some recent additions to the Lambek vocabulary such as Galois connections and Grishin interactions. It concludes with an exploration of the generative capacity of the Lambek-Grishin calculus, presenting an embedding of lexicalized tree adjoining grammars into the Lambek-Grishin calculus