Maxime Amblard

Introducing a Calculus of Effects and Handlers for Natural Language Semantics

In compositional model-theoretic semantics, researchers assemble truth-conditions or other kinds of denotations using the lambda calculus. It was previously observed that the lambda terms and/or the denotations studied tend to follow the same pattern: they are instances of a monad. In this paper, we present an extension of the simply-typed lambda calculus that exploits this uniformity using the recently discovered technique of effect handlers. We prove that our calculus exhibits some of the key formal properties of the lambda calculus and we use it to construct a modular semantics for a small fragment that involves multiple distinct semantic phenomena.

Modeling the Dynamic Effects of Discourse: Principles and Frameworks

In the study of the meaning of natural language expressions, the sentence level provides a natural entry point. Its relevance depends, of course, on the focus we want to put on meaning: as related to thoughtThought, to communication, to truth, etc. In this paper, we concentrate on the model theoretic view of meaning, in particular via first-order logic representation. More specifically, we present phenomena that illustrate the challenges posed by discourse to truth-conditional semanticsSemantics and compositionalityCompositionality. We show that proposals to address these challenges rely on the additional device of contexts Context and on the way sentences can access and modify these contextsContext. This capability is usually referred to as the context change potential Context change potential of a sentence. Depending on the phenomenon, contextsContext need to represent different kinds of informationInformation: propositions, discourse referents, and variations on these elements. We also show that taking into account the rhetorical structureStructure!rhetorical structure, discourse structure of discourse leads to even richer structuring of the contextContext. Parallel to the presentation of the phenomena, we concentrate on formalismsFormalism giving an account of the dynamicsDynamics of discourse. We introduce the well-established formalismsFormalism of Discourse Representation Theory (DRT)DRT (Discourse Representation Theory), Dynamic Predicate Logic (DPLLogic!DPL (Dynamic Predicate Logic)), and the more recently developed approach based on continuationContinuation semanticsSemantics. Finally, we introduce Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRTSDRT (Segmented Discourse Representation Theory)) which combines the effects of dynamicsDynamics and discourse structureStructure!rhetorical structure, discourse structure.

Accessibility for plurals in continuation semantics

This paper accounts for the semantics of plurality, in particular, the accessibility relation for plural anaphora. Two types of discourse antecedents formations, inherited from the classical treatment [16], namely summation and abstraction, are studied in detail. Solutions for each phenomenon are provided respectively by introducing two new functions

Using SDRT to analyze pathological conversations. Logicality, rationality and pragmatic deviances

\mathfrak{Sum}

Schizophrénie, logicité et perspective en première personne ☆

and

Étude quantitative des disfluences dans le discours de schizophrènes : automatiser pour limiter les biais

\mathfrak{Abs}

L'impossibilité de l'anonymat dans le cadre de l'analyse du discours

, for obtaining the semantic interpretations. The technical background in this paper is based on a recently proposed dynamic semantic framework [10], which pertains a style of the traditional Montague Grammar and the principle of compositionality, without adding any new concept to classical logic.