Continuations in Natural Language
I was reading about Chris Barker’s research and I found this paper on Continuations in Natural Language interesting. Chris has written another paper called Continuations and the Nature of Quantification that I have yet to read but sounds interesting also.
Continuations have interesting uses, for instance the ambiguous operator can be implemented with them. It would be fun to learn more about using the ambiguous operator/continuations for pronoun disambiguation, I hope that’s what I’ll get from reading Continuations and the Nature of Quantification. Once again, perhaps it’s time to go back to school finally. But we know what people like jwz have to say about computational linguistics…
Here are the abstracts from the papers I mentioned above. The first is easily readable by anyone who’s studied a bit of linguistics and requires very little understanding of computer science or programming concepts. The second paper is a bit more heavy on the CS.
Computer scientists, logicians and functional programmers have studied continuations in laboratory settings for years. As a result of that work, continuations are now accepted as an indispensable tool for reasoning about control, order of evaluation, classical versus intuitionistic proof, and more. But all of the applications just mentioned concern artificial languages; what about natural languages, the languages spoken by humans in their daily life? Do natural languages get by without any of the marvelous control operators provided by continuations, or can we find continuations in the wild? This paper argues yes: that an adequate and complete analysis of natural language must recognize and rely on continuations. In support of this claim, I identify four independent linguistic phenomena for which a simple CPS-based description provides an insightful analysis
http://ling.ucsd.edu/~barker/Research/barker-cw.pdf
This paper proposes that the meanings of some natural language expressions should be thought of as functions on their own continuations. Continuations are a well-established technique in the theory of programming language semantics; in brief, a continuation is the entire default future of a computation. I show how a continuation-based grammar can unify several aspects of natural language quantification in a new way: merely stating the truth conditions for quantificational expressions in terms of continuations automatically accounts for scope displacement and scope ambiguity. To prove this claim, I exhibit a simple finite context-free grammar with a strictly compositional semantics in which quantificational NPs are interpreted in-situ but take semantic scope over larger constituents. There is no Quantifier Raising (nor any use of a level of Logical Form distinct from overt syntax), no Cooper Storage (or other similar mechanisms used in many recent HPSG, Categorial, or Type-logical treatments), and no need for type-shifting (as in Hendriks’ Flexible Types account). Continuations also provide a natural account of generalized coordination that does not require either type-shifting or type-polymorphism. Compositionality issues are discussed in some detail.