Categorial Grammars 2004: An Efficient Tool for NLP
 

Algorithmic and theoretical problems arising during syntactical analysis

Categorial grammars, type grammars and pregroups are formal structures
for deciding whether a string of words is a grammatical sentence. They
assign one or more types to each word in the dictionary. One solves
the problem whether a sequence of words is a grammatical sentence, by
performing computations on the corresponding string(s) of types. This
makes it possible to characterise the syntactic properties of natural
languages entirely in terms of their lexical types and prove general
properties, independent of the actual language fragment. These
grammars are related to other mathematical approaches like
intuitionist, classical and compact bilinear logic, non-symmetric
*-autonomous categories, Montague semantics and Chomsky's minimalist
programme. Some of these methods have matured to highly efficient
tools for syntactical analysis. Previous meetings were held in Tucson,
Rome, Nancy, Nantes, Trento and Ottawa. This symposium will cover new
theoretical results and applications to natural languages.

Important dates:

Submission EXTENDED deadline: 7 March, 2004
Notification of accepted papers: 7 April, 2004
Final versions, deadline: 7 May, 2004

Proceedings: The accepted papers will be published as a special issue
of Applied Logic by Elsevier. The results must be unpublished and not
submitted for publication elsewhere, including other symposia or
workshops. The authors should mention at least one keyword among the
topics below at the end of the abstract. For more instructions go to:
http://www.lirmm.fr/CG2004

All papers should be submitted electronically to: degeilh@lirmm.fr

Topics:

Formal grammars for natural languages, in particular (non exhaustive list) :

Pregroups
Pregroups applied to natural languages
Compact bilinear logic
Non-symmetric *-autonomous categories
Lambek syntactical calculus
Multimodal categorial grammars
Word order, discontinuous constituents
Dependencies, constraints to movement
Learning algorithms
Complexity of algorithms
Minimalist grammars
Lexical grammars
Tree adjoining grammars