Re: Mathematics for sentence composition?

[Graham White <g.graham.white@gmail.com>]

Valeria's suggestions look fine. I'd also like to suggest Ruth
Kempson's theory of dynamic syntax (see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_syntax ),
which is a sort of indirect response to Bob's question. One thing that
is relevant here is that people very rarely talk in
complete sentences, and that, in conversation, people continue each
other's partial utterances quite fluidly (this is not trivial,
because it involves changing a lot of pronouns and such from one
speaker to the next). Now a natural way to formalise this
would be to have a context shared between the interlocutors, and to
have context updating rules as well as parsing rules in
the grammar. So this, too, would be a way of addressing the questions
which Bob raised.

(Two remarks on this: firstly, talking about context is how I describe
this stuff, not how Ruth does. Secondly, using context
in this way comes naturally to us theoretical computer scientists, but
not so naturally to linguists of the traditional sort.)

Graham
On Thu, Oct 25, 2018 at 11:23 AM Valeria de Paiva
<valeria.depaiva@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> hi Bob,
> As you'd expect there is a lot of literature into discourse analysis. I'm
> sure you're already know about DRT
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourse_representation_theory
> but you may not have heard of  "segmented discourse representation theory
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segmented_discourse_representation_theory>"
> (SDRT) presented in
> Asher, Nicholas
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nicholas_Asher&action=edit&redlink=1>
> and Alex Lascarides (2003). *Logics of Conversation
> <https://books.google.com/books?id=VD-8yisFhBwC>*. Studies in Natural
> Language Processing. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-65058-5
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/0-521-65058-5>
> or RST Mann, William C. and Sandra A .Thompson (1988). "Rhetorical
> Structure Theory
> <http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~nenkova/Courses/cis700-2/rst.pdf>: A theory of
> text organization". *Text <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_(journal)>*
> *8*: 243–281.
> or  LDM (Linguistic Discourse Model) e.g.  in
> https://wing.comp.nus.edu.sg/%7Eantho/W/W04/W04-0211.pdf, from Livia
> Polanyi, for example.
> I thought the Tutorial Discourse Structure: Theory, Practice and Use
> <http://aclweb.org/anthology/P10-5003>(
> https://aclanthology.info/papers/P10-5003/p10-5003) would be useful, but I
> couldn't find its contents online.
> I don't know much about the area, but I know there are lots more.
> best,
> Valeria
>
> On Wed, Oct 24, 2018 at 5:25 PM Bob Coecke <bob.coecke@cs.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> This is a request for information from those with knowledge of
>> computational linguistics and related things.
>>
>> Sentence structure is a long-established field, most notably with major
>> contributions by Lambek, and concerns how words compose within a sentence.
>> How much ( is known / has been done ) in mathematical terms on composing
>> sentences in order to form stories?
>>
>> Im am working on something, don’t want to re-invent the wheel, and also
>> want to use/credit what has been done before.
>>
>> Cheers, Bob.
>
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-- 
Graham White
London


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