[Pl-seminar] Talk today: Continuations and natural language

[Ken Shan]

[Please distribute this announcement!  Apologies for multiple copies.]

The Harvard Artificial Intelligence Research Group announces

                    CONTINUATIONS AND NATURAL LANGUAGE

A talk by

             Chris Barker, University of California, San Diego

                 11:45am-12:45pm, Thursday October 2, 2003
                  Maxwell Dworkin 223, Harvard University
                         (see below for logistics)

I propose that the meanings of some natural language expressions should
be thought of as functions on their own continuations.  Continuations
are a well-established technique in the theory of programming language
semantics; in brief, a continuation is the entire default future of a
computation.  In the context of programming languages, continuations
provide a principled way of reasoning about non-local control, including
side-effects.  I will sketch a research program that I am pursuing
in collaboration with Chung-chieh Shan in which we treat a variety
of natural-language phenomena as side-effects.  I will also present
two concrete case studies in some detail.  The first concerns natural
language quantification (e.g., the role of "everyone" in "Alice saw
everyone").  I show that merely stating the truth conditions for
quantificational expressions in terms of continuations automatically
accounts for scope displacement and scope ambiguity.  The second case
study argues that continuations also provide a natural account of
coordination (e.g., the role of "but" in "Everyone loves but no one
wants to marry his mother") that, unlike other popular accounts, does
not require either type-shifting or type-polymorphism.

LOGISTICS: Lunch will be served; if you plan to attend this talk but
do not usually attend AIRG meetings, please inform Chung-chieh Shan
<ccshan at eecs.harvard.edu> so we have enough food.  Maxwell Dworkin
Laboratory is located at 33 Oxford St, Cambridge, MA 02138.  Subway
and driving directions and a campus map are available online at
http://www.deas.harvard.edu/aboutdeas/ourcampus/deasbuildsandmaps/ .
Parking is available for bicycles and motor vehicles; please email
Chung-chieh Shan <ccshan at eecs.harvard.edu> for details.

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