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2013 | Buch

Logic, Language, and Computation

9th International Tbilisi Symposium on Logic, Language, and Computation, TbiLLC 2011, Kutaisi, Georgia, September 26-30, 2011, Revised Selected Papers

herausgegeben von: Guram Bezhanishvili, Sebastian Löbner, Vincenzo Marra, Frank Richter

Verlag: Springer Berlin Heidelberg

Buchreihe : Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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Über dieses Buch

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Tbilisi Symposium on Logic, Language, and Computation, TbiLLC 2011, held in Kutaisi, Georgia, in September 2011. The book consists of summaries of 3 tutorials presented at the symposium together with 13 full papers that were carefully reviewed and selected from the submissions. The papers are organized in two sections, one on Language and one on Logic and Computation. The range of topics covered in the Language section includes natural language syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, frames in natural language semantics, linguistic typology, and discourse phenomena. The papers in the Logic and Computation section cover such topics as constructive, modal, algebraic, and philosophical logic, as well as logics for computer science applications.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Frontmatter

Summaries of Tutorials

Computational Social Choice (with a Special Emphasis on the Use of Logic)
Abstract
This is a summary of a tutorial on computational social choice, delivered at the 9th Tbilisi Symposium on Language, Logic and Computation in Kutaisi, Georgia, in September 2011. The tutorial specifically focussed on the use of logic in the field.
Ulle Endriss
Binding - Data, Theory, Typology
Abstract
The tutorial gave an overview of the treatment of variable binding in natural language semantics. A set of data was singled out, two families of approaches to deal with reflexivity were presented which yield a comparable data coverage, and the cross-linguistic variation of reflexivization strategies was reviewed. The modelling options map neatly onto the variation found in natural language.
Daniel Hole
Łukasiewicz Logic: An Introduction
Abstract
This is a summary of the contents of a tutorial in logic offered at the conference. The tutorial provided a very gentle introduction to the elementary aspects of Łukasiewicz (infinite-valued propositional) logic.
Vincenzo Marra

Contributions in Language

The Information Structure and Typological Peculiarities of the Georgian Passive Constructions
Abstract
Functionally defined Passive Constructions are characterized as the conversive ones of corresponding active constructions, where a patient is promoted to the subject position, and an agent is demoted and transformed into a prepositional phrase. Georgian passive constructions do not always show such a conversion and actually express a variety of semantics: deponents, reflexives, reciprocals, potentials, etc. The peculiarities of Georgian passive define the restrictions of their usage in the processes of information structuring, where patient foregrounding implies certain morphosyntactic changes characteristic for conversive-passive constructions. The analysis of the Georgian sentence information structure provides a strong argument for interpreting Georgian passive as a grammatical category mostly governed by cognitive-semantic, and not simply by syntactic, features. This paper suggests a cognitive productive model and some semantic features that define the choice of either the passive or active formal models for grammatical representations of verbs showing so-called medial semantics.
Rusudan Asatiani
Discourse Structuring Questions and Scalar Implicatures
Abstract
In this paper we discuss the interdependence of scalar implicatures and discourse structuring questions. We show that even prototypical cases of scalar implicatures can depend on an explicitly or implicitly given Question under Discussion. Particularly, we argue against the idea that scalar implicatures are automatically generated by the logical form of an utterance. We distinguish between three types of discourse questions each having different effects on implicatures.
Anton Benz, Fabienne Salfner
Towards a Logic of Information Exchange
An Inquisitive Witness Semantics
Introduction
Traditionally, the meaning of a sentence is identified with its truth conditions. This approach is driven by the age-old attention that philosophy has devoted to the study of argumentation. In terms of truth conditions one defines entailment, the crucial notion that rules the soundness of an argument: a sentence ϕ is said to entail another sentence ψ in case the truth conditions for ϕ are at least as stringent as the truth conditions for ψ.
Ivano Ciardelli, Jeroen Groenendijk, Floris Roelofsen
Sitting, Standing, and Lying in Frames: A Frame-Based Approach to Posture Verbs
Abstract
Posture verbs which allow for an extended locative use, such as sit, stand and lie, make reference to specific parts of the localized object, to the orientation of prominent object axes and to positional information, which are perceived by means of cognitive modules such as gestalt recognition and spatial perception. These properties render posture verbs an excellent object for the investigation of cognition and language. This paper analyzes the three basic posture verbs of German (sitzen ‘sit’, stehen ‘stand’ and liegen ‘lie’) in terms of frame representations. It turns out that frames can serve as a highly flexible device for decompositional analyses that is at the same time a cognitively plausible knowledge representation format.
Thomas Gamerschlag, Wiebke Petersen, Liane Ströbel
Alleged Assassins: Realist and Constructivist Semantics for Modal Modification
Abstract
Modal modifiers such as Alleged oscillate between being subsective and being privative. If individual a is an alleged assassin (at some parameter of evaluation) then it is an open question whether a is an assassin (at that parameter). Standardly, modal modifiers are negatively defined, in terms of failed inferences or non-intersectivity or non-extensionality. Modal modifiers are in want of a positive definition and a worked-out logical semantics. This paper offers two positive definitions. The realist definition is elaborated within Tichý’s Transparent Intensional Logic (TIL) and builds upon Montague’s model-theoretic semantics for adjectives as representing mappings from properties to properties. The constructivist definition is based on an extension of Martin-Löf’s Constructive Type Theory (CTT) so as to accommodate partial verification. We show that, and why, “a is an alleged assassin” and “Allegedly, a is an assassin” are equivalent in TIL and synonymous in CTT.
Bjørn Jespersen, Giuseppe Primiero
An Outline of a Dynamic Theory of Frames
Abstract
In this article we present an extension to the theory of frames developed in Petersen (2007). Petersen’s theory only applies to concepts for persistent objects like trees or dogs but not to concepts for actions and events that are inherently dynamic because they describe factual changes in the world. Basic frames are defined as Kripke-models. In order to represent the dynamic dimension one needs in addition both combinations of and transformation between such models. Combinations of Kripke-models are used for temporalization (representing stages of objects and the temporal development of events) and refinement (representing the internal structure of objects). Such combinations are defined using techniques from Finger & Gabbay (1992) and Blackburn & de Rijke (1997). Transformations between Kripke-models are used to represent the factual changes brought about by events. Such transformations are defined using strategies from Dynamic Logic and Dynamic Epistemic Logic, Van Benthem et al. (2005).
Ralf Naumann
What Does It Mean for an Indefinite to Be Presuppositional?
Abstract
The paper is concerned with the nature of the presuppositionality involved in “strong” (or presuppositional) indefinite noun phrases in general, and Turkish accusative marked indefinites in particular. It investigates the semantics of Turkish accusative indefinites with regard to the categories of existential import, contextual restrictedness (or D-linking) and semantic scope, within the DRT-based Binding Theory of presupposition justification. It argues that neither contextual restrictedness nor scope properties alone can account for the semantics of Turkish Acc-indefinites. It further argues that existential import, modeled as anaphoricity encoded in the semantics of Acc-indefinites, is fundamental to “strong” indefiniteness in Turkish and can be construed as the source of both contextual restrictedness and wide scope behavior.
Umut Özge

Contributions in Logic and Computation

Dynamics of Defeasible and Tentative Inference
Abstract
Standard refinements of epistemic and doxastic logics that avoid the problems of logical and deductive omniscience cannot easily be generalised to default reasoning. This is even more so when defeasible reasoning is understood as tentative reasoning; an understanding that is inspired by the dynamic proofs of adaptive logic. In the present paper we extend the abnormality (preference) models for adaptive consequence with a set of open worlds to account for this type of inferential dynamics. In doing so, we argue that unlike for mere deductive reasoning, tentative inference cannot be modelled without such open worlds.
Patrick Allo
Decidability for Justification Logics Revisited
Abstract
Justification logics are propositional modal-like logics that instead of statements A is known include statements of the form A is known for reason t where the term t can represent an informal justification for A or a formal proof of A. In our present work, we introduce model-theoretic tools, namely: filtrations and a certain form of generated submodels, in the context of justification logic in order to obtain decidability results. Apart from reproving already known results in a uniform way, we also prove new results. In particular, we use our submodel construction to establish decidability for a justification logic with common knowledge for which so far no decidability proof was available.
Samuel Bucheli, Roman Kuznets, Thomas Studer
Interpreted Systems Semantics for Process Algebra with Identity Annotations
Abstract
Process algebras have been developed as formalisms for specifying the behavioral aspects of protocols. Interpreted systems have been proposed as a semantic model for multi-agent communication. In this paper, we connect these two formalisms by defining an interpreted systems semantics for a generic process algebraic formalism. This allows us to translate and compare the vast body of knowledge and results for each of the two formalisms to the other and perform epistemic reasoning, e.g., using model-checking tools for interpreted systems, on process algebraic specifications. Based on our translation we formulate and prove some results about the interpreted systems generated by process algebraic specifications.
Francien Dechesne, Mohammad Reza Mousavi
The Duality of State and Observation in Probabilistic Transition Systems
Abstract
In this paper we consider the problem of representing and reasoning about systems, especially probabilistic systems, with hidden state. We consider transition systems where the state is not completely visible to an outside observer. Instead, there are observables that partly identify the state. We show that one can interchange the notions of state and observation and obtain what we call a dual system. In the case of deterministic systems, the double dual gives a minimal representation of the behaviour of the original system. We extend these ideas to probabilistic transition systems and to partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs).
Monica Dinculescu, Christopher Hundt, Prakash Panangaden, Joelle Pineau, Doina Precup
Model Checking for Modal Intuitionistic Dependence Logic
Abstract
Modal intuitionistic dependence logic (\(\mathcal MIDL \)) incorporates the notion of “dependence” between propositions into the usual modal logic and has connectives which correspond to intuitionistic connectives in a certain sense. It is the modal version of a variant of first-order dependence logic (Väänänen 2007) considered by Abramsky and Väänänen (2009) basing on Hodges’ team semantics (1997).
In this paper, we study the computational complexity of the model checking problem for \(\mathcal MIDL\) and its fragments built by restricting the operators allowed in the logics. In particular, we show that the model checking problem for \(\mathcal MIDL\) in general is PSPACE-complete and that for propositional intuitionistic dependence logic is coNP-complete.
Johannes Ebbing, Peter Lohmann, Fan Yang
Coalgebraic Predicate Logic: Equipollence Results and Proof Theory
Abstract
The recently introduced Coalgebraic Predicate Logic (CPL) provides a general first-order syntax together with extra modal-like operators that are interpreted in a coalgebraic setting. The universality of the coalgebraic approach allows us to instantiate the framework to a wide variety of situations, including probabilistic logic, coalition logic or the logic of neighbourhood frames. The last case generalises a logical setup proposed by C.C. Chang in early 1970’s. We provide further evidence of the naturality of this framework. We identify syntactically the fragments of CPL corresponding to extended modal formalisms and show that the full CPL is equipollent with coalgebraic hybrid logic with the downarrow binder and the universal modality. Furthermore, we initiate the study of structural proof theory for CPL by providing a sequent calculus and a cut-elimination result.
Tadeusz Litak, Dirk Pattinson, Katsuhiko Sano
Backmatter
Metadaten
Titel
Logic, Language, and Computation
herausgegeben von
Guram Bezhanishvili
Sebastian Löbner
Vincenzo Marra
Frank Richter
Copyright-Jahr
2013
Verlag
Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Electronic ISBN
978-3-642-36976-6
Print ISBN
978-3-642-36975-9
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-36976-6