February 15, 2005
10:00, LH 101

Linguistic side effects

Chung-chieh Shan

Abstract:
How do expressions manage to both denote meanings and perform actions? Researchers of programming languages have developed formalisms and intuition to address this question. I use the same tools to represent natural-language meanings, for applications such as question answering.

For example, pronouns in natural languages and variable references in programming languages can both be thought to retrieve a value from a storage cell in memory, and thus treated analogously. More generally, computational side effects in programming languages (like input and control) are analogous to apparently noncompositional phenomena in natural languages (like questions and quantifiers). Both sides of this analogy can be treated by giving expressions access to their contexts.

Just as the order in which a computer executes parts of a program can be modeled in the same way for all computational side effects, the order in which a human processes parts of an utterance can be modeled in the same way for all apparently noncompositional phenomena. This notion of processing uniformly accounts for such diverse phenomena as crossover in anaphora, superiority in questions, and ordering effects in polarity licensing and quantifier scope. This application of programming-language theory thus unifies an unprecedented variety of natural-language phenomena. In the opposite direction, I will also mention how linguistic theory can help programmers develop interactive Web applications.

Biography:
Chung-chieh Shan is a PhD candidate in computer science at Harvard University. He studies the syntax and semantics of programming languages, especially computational side effects such as control, as well as the syntax and semantics of natural languages, especially apparently noncompositional phenomena such as quantification.