Spring 2008
Time: Monday and Wednesday 9 - 11 am
Place: Bunche 2150
Course ID: 253784200
In this course we shall look at semantics of natural language expressions in a very concrete way. We shall construct a finite model M and then translate sentence into logical formula which can be evaluated in M. Possible candidates are:
The idea is stay concrete: models are finite, and manipulations are done on elements of the model. This allows to use a computer to do the bookkeeping for us. Moreover, finite structures guarantee (at least in principle) that an answer to a query can be found.
On the way we shall discover how the different types that we find in OCaml are reflected as different objects in the model. A first-order structure, for example, sees the meaning of a relational symbol as a set of tuples. A functional model sees them as higher order functions. While we would like to think of them as being the same, they are not. And so must find ways to mediate between these two.