Conference on Computing Natural Reasoning

Logic was originally meant to systematize and analyze arguments in natural language. But in the 20th century the main developments in logic focused on mathematics and its foundations. Recently, a number of researchers have focused on logical systems tuned to natural language semantics to reconnect with the older tradition. The logical and conceptual underpinnings of some of these systems remains unclear, although some recent work has begun to address formal foundations.

The aim of this conference is to contribute to this direction in semantics and to discuss logics, especially proof systems, well-suited for natural language semantics and to explore comparisons between these systems. We also welcome input from people invoved in computational semantics, psychology of reasoning, and computer implementations of natural reasoning systems.

Topics of interest include:

• fragments of first-order logic which are powerful enough to represent interesting linguistic phenomena and yet small enough to be computationally feasible;
• extended syllogistic logics;
• logics and algorithms for use in textual entailment;
• natural logic and computational semantics;
• proof theoretic semantics;
• reasoning as model search;
• natural reasoning and model checking;
• natural logic and the psychology of reasoning;
• formalizations of inference tasks centered on linguistic expressions;
• applications of natural logic;
• formal models of reasoning in specific domains (“team” reasoning, models of reasoning in games).

We solicit talks on relevant topics. There will also be poster sessions, preceded by plenary ‘flash’ presentations of posters.

Invited Speakers

Valeria de Paiva (Nuance Communications): Lean Logic for Lean Times: Varieties of Natural Logic [abstract]

Nate Kushman (MIT): Text To Programs: Automating Computer Tasks from Natural Language Descriptions [abstract]

Matthias Scheutz (Tufts University): Beyond Command-Based Natural Language Interactions with Robots [abstract]

Ronaldo Vigo (Ohio University): On the Concept Learning Difficulty of the Logic Operators[abstract]

Contributed Papers

Lasha Abzianidze, A Natural Language Theorem Prover[abstract]

Torben Braüner, Patrick Blackburn and Irina Polyanskaya, Second-order false-beliefs, language and logic[abstract]

Ellen Breitholtz, Are Widows always wicked? Learning concepts through enthymematic reasoning[abstract]

Robin Cooper, Natural reasoning: truth or judgement based?[abstract]

Gabriel Gaudreault, Functional semantics for pregroup grammars [abstract]

John Kelleher and Simon Dobnik, A Model for Attention-Driven Judgements in Type Theory with Records [abstract]

Juan Jose Mendoza Santana and Juliana Küster Filipe Bowles, A logic-based approach to software development [abstract]

Special joint session with WoLLIC

CoCoNAT will have a joint session with the WoLLIC meeting on Monday, July 20 at 10:30. This session will consist of the WoLLIC talk by Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh and the CoCoNAT talk by Lasha Abzianidze.

The previous CoCoNat meeting

Information on the previous meeting may be found here.

Support

We are grateful for generous support from NWO (the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research) making CoCoNat 2015 possible.