Workshops

Negation: logical, linguistic and philosophical perspectives

Invited Speakers:

Laurence R. Horn (Yale University)
David Ripley (University of Connecticut)

Organizers: Franz Berto, Luca Incurvati, Julian Schlöder

Negation is a central feature of human communication. Yet, the logical, pragmatic, syntactic and semantic features of negation are controversial. The aim of this workshop is to bring together linguists, logicians and philosophers working on any aspect of negation. Accordingly, we invite contributions addressing any negation-related topic, including but not limited to neg-raising, negation in non-classical logic, logical pluralism, negative polarity items, and negation and denial. Contributions that attempt to bridge the gap between different approaches to the study of negation will be especially welcomed.

Reasoning in natural language: symbolic and sub-symbolic approaches

Invited speakers:

Christopher Potts (Stanford University)
Mirella Lapata (University of Edinburgh)

Organizers: Jakub Szymanik, Willem Zuidema

Reasoning in natural language – including entailment, contradiction, implicatures – is studied in a variety of fields. In formal semantics, accounting for how we reason with various language fragments is a central challenge, usually approached by using some expressive variety of logic. In computational linguistics, recognizing textual entailment in particular has become a central topic, considered a key component of an integral natural language processing system. The dominating approach here is based on statistical inference (with probability distributions defined over relatively simple symbolic ‘backbones’), with more recently increasing interest in vectorial and neural models. In this workshop we will address the relation between these two worlds of symbolic and sub-symbolic approaches to NL reasoning, and discuss the relevance of various models for the cognitive science of human reasoning and natural language understanding. The workshop will highlight new interfaces between logic, computational semantics, psychology of reasoning, and computer implementations of natural reasoning systems.

Satellite workshops on questions in pragmatics, logic and semantics

Directly preceding the Amsterdam Colloquium there will be two satellite workshops, one on questions in logic and semantics and one on questions in pragmatics.