Aim and Topics
Submission
Program
Tutorial Lecture
Important Dates
Organizing Committee
Contact
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Logic and Engineering of Natural Language Semantics 9 (LENLS 9)

Workshop Site:Amusement Zone Miyazaki (The JA-AZM Hall)
Kirishima 1-1-1, Miyazaki, Japan
http://www.jaazm.jp/access/english.html
Dates: November 30 - December 2, 2012
Chair:
  • Alastair Butler (PRESTO JST/Tohoku University)
Co-chair:
  • Daisuke Bekki (Ochanomizu University/National Institute of Informatics)
  • Eric McCready (Aoyama Gakuin University)
Invited Speakers:
  • Hans Kamp (University of Stuttgart)
  • Kazuhiko Fukushima (Kansai Gaidai University)

Aim and Topics

LENLS is an annual international workshop on formal syntax, semantics and pragmatics, focusing on the following topics. It will be held as one of the workshops of the forth JSAI International Symposia on AI (isAI2012) sponsored by the Japan Society for Artificial Intelligence (JSAI).

  • Dynamic syntax/semantics/pragmatics of natural language
  • Categorical/topological/coalgebraic approaches for natural language syntax/semantics/pragmatics
  • Logic and its relation to natural language and linguistic reasoning (especially dynamic logics)
  • Type-theoretic approaches to natural language
  • Formal Philosophy of language
  • Formal pragmatics (especially game-theoretic and utility-theoretic approaches)
  • Substructural expansion of Lambek Lambda Calculi
  • Many-valued/Fuzzy and other non-classical logics and natural language

Selected Papers

We also plan to publish a selection of the accepted/invited papers as a portion of a volume "JSAI-isAI2012 selected papers", which will be published from `Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence' series (Springer Verlag).

Important dates:

Abstract submission deadline:September 9, 2012 (EXTENDED)
Notification of acceptance:October 10, 2012
Deadline for camera-ready copy:October 31, 2012
Deadline for onsite registration:November 24, 2012
LENLS 9:November 30-December 01, 2012
Tutorial Lecture (by Hans Kamp):December 02, 2012

Registration:

The proceedings of the workshop will be available at the conference site for registered persons. Please follow the link below and register yourself until 24th November 2012.

http://www.ai-gakkai.or.jp/jsai-isai/2012/index.html#registration

Program

November 30th (Fri), 2012

09:00-10:00 Reception and Coffee Break
10:00-10:10 Opening Remarks
10:10-11:40 Session 1
  • Aleksandra Kislak-Malinowska and Claudia Casadio
  • "Tupled Pregroups: A Study of Italian Clitic Patterns"
  • Kata Balogh
  • "Hungarian pre-verbal focus and exhaustivity"
  • Chungmin Lee
  • "Psych Predicates, the First Person, and Evidentiality "
11:40-13:30 Lunch
13:30-15:00 Session 2
  • Liesbeth Martens and Giuseppe Primiero
  • "A Formal Approach to Vague Indexicals"
  • Sai Qian and Maxime Amblard
  • "Accessibility for Plurals in Continuation Semantics"
  • Takuya Matsuzaki
  • "Toward Wide-Coverage Natural Language Mathematical Problem Solving"
15:00-15:30 Coffee break
15:30-17:00 Session 3
  • Pascal Amsili, Emilia Ellsiepen and Gr'egoire Winterstein
  • "Parameters on the obligatoriness of `too'"
  • Eric Mccready and Nicholas Asher
  • "Winning Strategies in Politeness"
  • Daisuke Bekki and Nicholas Asher
  • "Subtyping for Logical Polysemy and Copredication"
17:00-17:30 Coffee break
17:30-18:30 Invited Talk 1
  • Hans Kamp
  • "Speaking about the Present and Temporal Perspective Shift"

Alternates

  • Satoru Suzuki
  • "Measurement-Theoretic Foundations of Multidimensional-Predicate-Comparison Logic"

December 01st (Sat), 2012

09:30-10:30 Reception and Coffee break
10:30-11:30 Session 4
  • Richard Zuber
  • "Reciprocals as higher order functions"
  • Decock Lieven, Richard Dietz and Douven Igor
  • "Modelling Comparative Concepts in Conceptual Spaces"
11:30-13:30 Lunch
13:30-15:00 Session 5
  • Hanti Lin
  • "When `Or' Meets `Might': A Compositional Assertability Semantics for Classical Logic and Epistemic Modals"
  • Kohei Kishida
  • "Public Announcements under Sheaves"
  • Shunsuke Yatabe
  • "Yablo's paradox, a coinductive language and its semantics"
15:00-15:30 Coffee break
15:30-17:00 Session 6
  • David Yoshikazu Oshima
  • "On the functions of the Japanese discourse particle `ne': A study with special reference to intonation"
  • J.-R. Hayashishita and Daisuke Bekki
  • "On the semantic relation between noun phrases and quantity expressions in Japanese"
  • Alastair Butler, Ruriko Otomo, Zhen Zhou and Kei Yoshimoto
  • "Treebank annotation for formal semantics research"
17:00-17:30 Coffee break
17:30-18:30 Invited Talk 2
  • Kazuhiko Fukushima
  • "Negation with a Bound Morpheme and Direct Compositionality"

Tutorial Lecture

On December 2nd (Sun), there will also be a tutorial lecture at the workshop venue.

Lecturer

Hans Kamp (University of Stuttgart)

Venue

Amusement Zone Miyazaki (The JA-AZM Hall) (Kirishima 1-1-1, Miyazaki, Japan)

Time Table

10:00-12:00Session 1
12:00-14:00Lunch
14:00-16:00Session 2

Title

Referring in Verbal Communication: The role and function of names and other noun phrases as referential devices

Abstract

The point of saying something is (normally) to communicate a message to someone else. So we try to choose our words in such a way that those we address will be able to decode the message we want them to get. Part of this is that the words we choose must enable our addressees to determine who or what we are talking about. Languages have a repertoire of expressions that serve this `referring' function, most prominently nominal phrases. For instance, English has names, definite descriptions, pronouns and demonstratives. This means that when an English speaker wants to refer to someone or something, she has a choice between phrases of these different kinds. And her choice will be guided by which phrase will enable her addressees to identify the referent she intends.

But the different types of referring phrases come with different `decoding rules', which the recipient must apply in order to identify the referent. But whether an addressee will succeed in identifying the referent when he applies these rules, will usually depend on what information he already has and that he can apply the rules to. Therefore, when choosing a phrase to refer to a given person or thing, a speaker will be guided by what she assumes is already known to her audience.

A proper understanding of how different referring phrases function can only be gained by paying close attention to the communication-theoretic aspects of referring: We must study the interpretation and production of referring phrases in tandem, as part of a formally precise general theory of verbal communication which describes how thoughts are verbally encoded by the speaker and then decoded by the recipients of her utterance. I will outline such a general framework for the study of verbal communication, and we will use that framework to look into the conditions for successful use of different types of referring phrases, focussing in particular on proper names.

A crucial component of the general framework is the representation of complex mental states, composed out of propositional attitudes and entity representations. It is parts of such states that speakers convert into words when they produce an utterance and it is also parts of such states that help interpreters to turn those utterances back into mental representations (which they then incorporate into their mental states). The basis for this component is Discourse Representation Theory (DRT), and, more specifically, the DRT-based theory of propositional attitudes sketched in the last part of (Kamp, Van Genabith and Reyle, 2011).

H. Kamp, J. Van Genabith and U. Reyle, `An Updated Survey of DRT'. In: D. Gabbay (ed.) Handbook of Philosophical Logic, Volume 15, 125-394, Elsevier, 2011

Organizing/Program Committee:

  • Alastair Butler (PRESTO JST/Tohoku University)
  • Daisuke Bekki (Ochanomizu University/National Institute of Informatics)
  • Eric McCready (Aoyama Gakuin University)
  • Koji Mineshima (Keio University)
  • Yoshiki Mori (University of Tokyo)
  • Yasuo Nakayama (Osaka University)
  • Katsuhiko Sano (Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology)
  • Katsuhiko Yabushita (Naruto University of Education)
  • Tomoyuki Yamada (Hokkaido University)
  • Shunsuke Yatabe (National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology)
  • Kei Yoshimoto (Tohoku University)

Contact:

lenls9[[at]]easychair.org