Joint CS/Cog Sci Colloquium: Natural Logic

Abstract

This talk is about a direction in logic which attempts to have something to say, and something to learn, from computational linguistics and natural language processing.

Much of modern logic originates in work on the foundations of mathematics. My talk reports on work in logic that has a different goal, the study of inference in language. This study leads to what I will call "natural logic" , the enterprise of studying logical inference in languages that look more like natural language than standard logical systems.

The talk will be programmatic and far-ranging rather than detailed. I hope to touch on computer implementations of natural logics, teaching materials on this topic, and interactions of logic and cognitive science.

Bio: Lawrence S. Moss is Professor of Mathematics at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is also Director of Graduate Studies in Cognitive Science, and Adjunct Professor in Computer Science, Informatics, Linguistics, and Philosophy. His BA and MA degrees were from UCLA, and he earned his PhD degree from there in 1984. He held positions at Stanford University’s Center for the Study of Language and Information, the University of Michigan, and the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center before moving to Indiana. He served as chair of the Steering Committee of the North American Summer School in Logic, Language, and Information and has chaired several conference program committees. He is (co-)author of over 90 publications. These include the 1996 book Vicious Circles (with Jon Barwise), as well as articles and handbook chapters on natural logic, coalgebra, modal logic, dynamic epistemic logic, natural language semantics, recursion and other topics.