First-order Modal and Temporal Logics: State of the art and perspectives

Valentin Goranko and Dmitry Shkatov.

Workshop website: https://dshkatov.github.io/fomtl2023/

First-order modal and temporal logics are of fundamental importance for reasoning about necessity, possi- bility, and temporality. They offer a broad range of actual and potential applications to philosophy, artificial intelligence, computer science, cognitive science, and linguistics.

The studies of modal and temporal logics originated from ancient and more recent philosophical problems and flourished after the introduction of the possible worlds semantics in the 1960s. During the past 60 years these studies branched into numerous directions and became increasingly more technical and computationally oriented. Furthermore, mainly due to influence of computer science, the development of modal and temporal logic since late 1970s has been mostly focused on propositional logics. The studies of first-order modal and temporal logics, which are mainly motivated by philosophical and linguistic issues, have, on the other hand, taken a backstage. This is mostly due to the much more challenging, both technical and conceptual, nature of the semantics of first-order modal and temporal logics and to the prevailing negative results (undecidability and non-axiomatizability) for them.

This workshop aims to revive and stimulate further interest in the theory and applications of first-order modal and temporal logics by reviewing the state of the art in the field and identifying the most important research directions for future studies. The workshop will focus both on philosophical and computational aspects of first-order modal and temporal logics.

It aims to bring together researchers and graduate students working in the area to survey the state of theart and discuss the most important directions for future research. We welcome participants working in mathematics, philosophy, computer science, and linguistics.

Procedural and computational models of semantic and pragmatic processes

Sonia Ramotowska and Fabian Schlotterbeck

Workshop website: https://prosandcomps.github.io/

Procedural and computational modeling frameworks have been applied successfully to various aspects of semantic and pragmatic processes, yielding not only a good fit to empirical data but also insights of theoretical relevance. On the one hand, computational (e.g., Bayesian or information theoretic) models rationalize speaker behavior and explain how the listener can use the given information efficiently to infer the intended meaning from an utterance. However, these models often leave the stepwise processing of linguistic information unspecified. On the other hand, procedural procedural (e.g., automata or ACT-R) models explain step-by-step cognitive processes behind meaning-related computations e.g., the process of building sentence representations. However, they often lack the means to combine different information types in an interactive fashion. The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers applying these two modeling methodologies to discuss their strengths and weaknesses and work towards an integrated approach.

Internal and external pressures shaping language

Milica Denić

Workshop website: https://sites.google.com/view/iepsl-esslli2023workshop/

Human languages vary in their phonology, morphosyntax and semantics, but there are important constraints on this variation. What explains these typological similarities and differences across languages? Recent work has combined tools from linguistics, cognitive psychology and computer science to address this question. In addition to empirical discoveries, this has led to novel hypotheses for how similarities and differences are to be accounted for, invoking internal (e.g. cognitive) and/or external (e.g. communicative, historical, geographical) pressures on language structure. The aims of the workshop are two-fold: (i) expand the knowledge of different internal and external pressures on language, and how they explain cross-linguistic similarities and differences in different aspects of language structure, (ii) invite a critical discussion of implications of this work for the study of human cognition more generally.

Modalities in substructural logics: applications at the interfaces of logic, language and computation

Monday and Tuesday only

Michael Moortgat and Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh

Workshop website: https://sites.google.com/view/esslli2023course/workshop

By calling into question the implicit structural rules that are taken for granted in classical logic, substructural logics have brought to the fore new forms of reasoning with applications in many interdisciplinary areas of interest. Modalities, in the substructural setting, provide the tools to control and finetune the logical resource management. The workshop explores the uses of substructural modalities in areas where logic meets linguistics and computer science. The workshop is supported by the EU-funded MOSAIC project (Modalities in Substructural Logics: Theory, Methods and Applications). A complementary proposed course is "Modal Lambek Calculus and its Natural Language Applications".