Seminar in Computational Linguistics

 Abstract: What is linguistic meaning, and where does it come from? How are the meanings of words and utterances related to the world and to perception? We are working towards a formal semantics that aims to provide answers to these and related questions, starting from the notion of situated linguistic interaction between agents. By interacting using language, agents coordinate not only on information but also on the meanings of linguistic expressions. The meanings of many expressions can, we argue, be modeled as classifiers of real-world information. Expressions can be individual words, but they can also be phrases and sentences whose meanings are composed from the meanings of their constituents. To make formally explicit the notions of coordination, compositionality and classification, and to relate these notions to each other, we use TTR (a type theory with records).