From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Msuck: nntp://news.gmane.io/gmane.science.mathematics.categories/9746 Path: news.gmane.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Graham White Newsgroups: gmane.science.mathematics.categories Subject: Re: Mathematics for sentence composition? Date: Tue, 30 Oct 2018 12:34:07 +0000 Message-ID: References: Reply-To: Graham White NNTP-Posting-Host: blaine.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable X-Trace: blaine.gmane.org 1540922000 18818 195.159.176.226 (30 Oct 2018 17:53:20 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@blaine.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 30 Oct 2018 17:53:20 +0000 (UTC) Cc: bob.coecke@cs.ox.ac.uk, categories@mta.ca To: Valeria de Paiva Original-X-From: majordomo@mlist.mta.ca Tue Oct 30 18:53:16 2018 Return-path: Envelope-to: gsmc-categories@m.gmane.org Original-Received: from smtp2.mta.ca ([198.164.44.40]) by blaine.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.84_2) (envelope-from ) id 1gHYCZ-0004jO-P0 for gsmc-categories@m.gmane.org; Tue, 30 Oct 2018 18:53:15 +0100 Original-Received: from mlist.mta.ca ([138.73.1.63]:32784) by smtp2.mta.ca with esmtp (Exim 4.80) (envelope-from ) id 1gHYDJ-0000K9-1w; Tue, 30 Oct 2018 14:54:01 -0300 Original-Received: from majordomo by mlist.mta.ca with local (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1gHYC3-0000KM-9w for categories-list@mlist.mta.ca; Tue, 30 Oct 2018 14:52:43 -0300 In-Reply-To: Precedence: bulk Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.science.mathematics.categories:9746 Archived-At: 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 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 > = " > (SDRT) presented in > Asher, Nicholas > > and Alex Lascarides (2003). *Logics of Conversation > *. Studies in Natural > Language Processing. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-65058-5 > > or RST Mann, William C. and Sandra A .Thompson (1988). "Rhetorical > Structure Theory > : A theory of > text organization". *Text * > *8*: 243=E2=80=93281. > 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 > ( > 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 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 senten= ce. >> How much ( is known / has been done ) in mathematical terms on composin= g >> sentences in order to form stories? >> >> Im am working on something, don=E2=80=99t want to re-invent the wheel, = and also >> want to use/credit what has been done before. >> >> Cheers, Bob. > > [For admin and other information see: http://www.mta.ca/~cat-dist/ ] --=20 Graham White London [For admin and other information see: http://www.mta.ca/~cat-dist/ ]