Logic and Engineering of Natural Language Semantics (LENLS) 7

This year’s workshop was the seventh LENLS and the second held at the Campus Innovation Center in Mita, Tokyo in November of 2010 as part of the JSAI International Symposia on AI program of the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence. The workshop featured invited talks by Alexandru Baltag, on dynamic epistemic logic, and Shunsuke Yatabe, on paradoxes—in particular, paradoxes arising from theories of truth—and coinduction. A paper based on that second talk, “Yablo-like Paradoxes and Co-induction”, appears in the present volume. In addition, 18 papers were selected by the program committee (see Acknowledgements) from the submitted abstracts for presentation and as alternates.

As always with the LENLS workshops, the content of the presented papers was rich and varied. This year’s theme was salience: its realization in natural language (as well as human reasoning and knowledge representation) and how it should be given a formal representation. In addition to papers on this topic, a wide range of topics were represented, including, on the empirical side, focus phenomena, negative polarity items, reduplication, factivity and vagueness, and, on the theoretical side, variable-free semantics, game-theoretic pragmatics, categorial grammar, and various sorts of dynamic logics. In the remainder of this introduction, I will briefly indicate the content of the papers selected from this wide array of topics to appear in the present volume.