Student Session

The ESSLLI Student Session will feature presentations by students at the intersection of logic, language and computation, taking place at ESSLLI 2022 in Galway, Ireland from August 8 to 19.

Zoom link

The ESSLLI Student Session is a hybrid event.

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Week 1 schedule

Monday 8 August, 15:50–16:50

Maria Beatrice Buonaguidi: Symmetry, locality and hyperintensionality
Lorenzo Pinton: Gathered Solutions for Numerous Problems: observations on relative clauses as partitive constructions
Yiyang Guo: Diminutives at word level and root level: -er in Colloquial Beijing Mandarin (lightning talk)

Tuesday 9 August, 15:50–16:50

Ammar Karkour: Py*: Formalization of Python's Verifiable Bytecode and Virtual Machine in F*
José C. Oliveira: Subjective Logic as a Model for Social Networks
Daumantas Kojelis: Completing the Picture: Complexity of the Ackermann Fragment (lightning talk)

Wednesday 10 August, 15:50–16:50

Jialiang Yan: The Overtone of Monotonicity under Desire
Sabina Domínguez Parrado, Gianluca Michelli & Elynn Weijland: Ignorance and Temporal Prepositions: a New Team-based Approach
Adèle Hénot-Mortier: A dynamic alternative-pruning account of asymmetries in Hurford disjunctions (lightning talk)

Thursday 11 August, 15:50–16:50

Steinunn Rut Friðriksdóttir and Hafsteinn Einarsson: Bootstrapping Icelandic knowledge graph data
Marta Ricchiardi and Francesca Torchio: Aligning corpus-derived argument structures of verbs and deverbal psych nouns in Italian
Zara Kancheva: Towards incorporating prepositions in BTB-WordNet – A case study (lightning talk)

Friday 12 August, 15:50–16:50

Beth Award Ceremony and Beth Lecture

Week 2 schedule

Monday 15 August, 15:50–16:50

Leyla Ade, Matteo Michelini & Pietro Vigiani: Proportionality in Liquid Democracy and Representative Democracy
Juta Pulijana: Socio-political generics: essentialist implicatures or essentialist readings? Critique of Sally Haslanger’s argument on the meaning of socio-political generics
Janek Guerrini: ‘Like a N’ constructions: genericity in similarity (lightning talk)

Tuesday 16 August, 15:50–16:50

Achille Fusco: Trovo vs. considero: Expressing subjective attitudes in Italian
Sara Amido and Sebastian Buchczyk: Whether-exclamatives
Zhengjie Situ: Existential Generics and Information Structure (lightning talk)

Wednesday 17 August, 15:50–16:50

Wenfei Ouyang: A Logic of Permitted/Obligatory Assertion with Epsitemic Norms
Masaya Taniguchi: Unprovability of Continuation-Passing Style Transformation in Lambek Calculus
Katia Parshina: Evolution of Predicate Logic Notation (lightning talk)

Thursday 18 August, 15:50–16:50

Poster session

Janek Guerrini: ‘Like a N’ constructions: genericity in similarity
Yiyang Guo: Diminutives at word level and root level: -er in Colloquial Beijing Mandarin
Adèle Hénot-Mortier: A dynamic alternative-pruning account of asymmetries in Hurford disjunctions
Zara Kancheva: Towards incorporating prepositions in BTB-WordNet – A case study
Daumantas Kojelis: Completing the Picture: Complexity of the Ackermann Fragment
Katia Parshina: Evolution of Predicate Logic Notation
Zhengjie Situ: Existential Generics and Information Structure

Friday 19 August, 15:50–16:00

Springer prize ceremony

Abstracts

Monday 8 August, 15:50–16:50

Symmetry, locality and hyperintensionality

Maria Beatrice Buonaguidi

In response to an article by Odintsov and Wansing which defines a formal notion of hyperintensionality and claims that, according to this notion, Leitgeb’s logic HYPE cannot be hyperintensional, I put forward three notions of hyperintensionality. I show that HYPE satisfies only the weakest of these three notions, and claim that HYPE can be understood as a sort of middle ground between an intensional logic and a hyperintensional logic.

Gathered Solutions for Numerous Problems: observations on relative clauses as partitive constructions

Lorenzo Pinton

We study the different patterns that gather-like and numerous-like predicates present in restrictive relative clauses. Restrictive relative clauses represents a novel case in which the two types of collective predicates differ, alongside the known cases involving proportional quantifiers and non-proportional partitive constructions. The first part of the solution provides an explanation on why numerous is generally bad in restrictive relative clauses. Since numerous is monotonic with respect to the parthood relation of plurals, any attempt of restriction will end up including the maximal element of the complete join semilattice, which is the sum of all the atoms. This results in triviality, since each member of the predicate that should be restricted is part of at least one numerous plural individual. The second part of the solution provides an analysis on why restrictive numerous is fine if it applies to complex predicates like gather students. Exploiting syntactic theories of pluralization, we argue that when the star operator is absent from gather, it can modify a plural predicate without preserving the complete join semilattice and this allows restriction by numerous.

A dynamic alternative-pruning account of asymmetries in Hurford disjunctions (lightning talk)

Adèle Hénot-Mortier

Hurford Disjunctions (HDs) are infelicitous disjunctions whereby one disjunct entails the other (Hurford 1974). The infelicity of basic HDs has been successfully modeled by several competing approaches (Schlenker 2009, Meyer 2013, Katzir 2014, Anvari 2018). HDs involving scalar items however, are subject to an asymmetry (Singh2008): when the weaker scalar item linearly precedes the stronger one, the sentence seems to be rescued from infelicity. This fact is not readily accounted for by standard approaches, which treat Hurford disjuncts in a symmetric fashion. Fox & Spector (2018) and Tomioka (2021) proposed two different solutions to that problem and extensions thereof, at the cost of positing a heavy or somewhat ad hoc machinery. Here we propose a novel analysis of this asymmetry, based the familiar process of alternative pruning. We suggest that exhaustification, which targets the weak disjunct, is based on a set of formal alternatives that is sensitive to previous material. Contrary to the other approaches, the asymmetry is derived via a direct computation, and not some global principle constraining either the insertion of the exhaustivity operator, or the particular shape of the alternative set.

Tuesday 9 August, 15:50–16:50

Py*: Formalization of Python's Verifiable Bytecode and Virtual Machine in F*

Ammar Karkour

In order to avoid implementation bugs and inconsistencies of defining programming languages, computer scientists define formal semantics rules that guide the implementation process. In the case of Python, it lacks a formal implementation as it doesn't have formal semantics that describe the behavior of its complex functionalities. Previous attempts to provide formal implementation for Python didn't fully succeed. Since direct formalization of Python source code is hard, in this project, we define formal semantics rules for Python's Bytecode instead, and embed them in the theorem prover F*. Following that we extract efficient executable OCaml code of our embedding, which could be used to interpret Python Bytecode and to find bugs in other interpreters.

Subjective Logic as a Model for Social Networks

José C. Oliveira

Our goal is to use subjective logic (SL), a quantitative logic with uncertainty, to model agents' opinions and uncertainty, and their changes over time, in social networks. We discuss the desired properties for an opinion update function in this setting. We show that SL's predefined belief update functions do not satisfy these properties, and we define a new belief update function satisfying the desired properties. We show that a special case of opinions in SL with our new update function corresponds to earlier (non-logical) work on social networks (Alvim 2019), and that the inclusion of uncertainty strictly extends this earlier work.

Completing the Picture: Complexity of the Ackermann Fragment (lightning talk)

Daumantas Kojelis

We give a decision procedure for the satisfiability problem of the Ackermann fragment with equality, when the number of trailing existential quantifiers is bounded by some fixed integer m, and thus establish an ExpTime upper-bound. Taking the work of R. Jaakkoa into account, we conclude that any Ackermann (sub-)fragment must feature at least two leading as well as an unbounded number of trailing existential quantifiers to retain NExpTime-hardness.

Wednesday 10 August, 15:50–16:50

The Overtone of Monotonicity under Desire

Jialiang Yan

The goal of this paper is to propose a unified account for different puzzles on upward monotonicity under desire. Conclusions drawn by monotonicity will be shown to license some additional inferences by pragmatic effects. It is assumed that a predicate can convey a potential disjunctive meaning via reinterpretation and hence gives rise to free choice effects. In addition, a logic-based framework is presented to capture free choice inferences and the reinterpretation process.

Ignorance and Temporal Prepositions: a New Team-based Approach

Sabina Domínguez Parrado, Gianluca Michelli & Elynn Weijland

In this paper, we provide a team-based semantics for temporal prepositions like and >i class="">from. Following Nouwen (2012), we distinguish between class A (before/after) and class B (by/from) temporal expressions. We discuss different linguistic data and the inferences that class A and class B temporal expressions generate. In particular, we claim that only class B expressions trigger ignorance effects. We then propose to analyse and >i class="">from as disjunctions (e.g. is equivalent to >i class="">t OR before). Finally, we develop a novel state-based system – which builds on Aloni (2022) – that accounts for the behaviour of class B expressions. The novelty of this approach resides in the use of \textit{team-based} temporal modalities as an alternative semantics for temporal prepositions.

Diminutives at word level and root level: -er in Colloquial Beijing Mandarin (lightning talk)

Yiyang Guo

This article investigates the syntactic behaviours of the diminutive marker -er in Colloquial Beijing Mandarin. With -er linearly suffixed to different roots, er-diminutives vary in the compatibility with augmentative modifiers and the requirement of diminutive specification conveyed by additional roots. I propose a threefold analysis: (i) Semantically, -er has two possible functions, viz. restriction and selection. (ii) Syntactically, these two functions are realised at word level and root level, respectively. (iii) The reason why -er can occur at two different levels is that -er is an acategorial particle, lacking a formal feature, so it can merge with words and roots freely.

Thursday 11 August, 15:50–16:50

Bootstrapping Icelandic knowledge graph data

Steinunn Rut Friðriksdóttir and Hafsteinn Einarsson

A knowledge graph is a semantic network of named entities, e.g. people, objects and organizations, that can be used to uniquely identify mentions in text. In order to create such a graph, it is crucial to possess plenty of specifically annotated data that includes not only the entities themselves but the relations that hold between them. Traditionally, such data has only been available for high-resource languages. In this paper, we present our approach to bootstrap training data using machine translation and open relation extraction methods. We hypothesize that by automatically translating our data to English, we can perform relation extraction using SOTA language models before translating the entities back to the source language, significantly reducing startup costs when developing such models for a given language. Our results show that this approach has promise for lower-resource languages such as Icelandic. However, it is currently limited due to the quality of translation and open relation extraction models.

Aligning corpus-derived argument structures of verbs and deverbal psych nouns in Italian

Marta Ricchiardi and Francesca Torchio

We discuss the results of an empirical study on argument structures of deverbal psych nouns in Italian. Our aim is to investigate psych predicates between syntax and semantics through a comparison between argument structures of psych verbs and their respective deverbal nouns. We used two resources of computational lexicography to collect corpus derived argument structures, and we provided a corpus based alignment of argument structures of Italian psych verbs and noun couples.

Towards incorporating prepositions in BTB-WordNet – A case study (lightning talk)

Zara Kancheva

The paper presents an initial attempt at investigating the topic of preposition incorporation in BulTreeBank WordNet. The focus is on the preposition 'на' (na) in verb+preposition+noun constructions. The prepositions are categorised by semantic classification and the verbs by the categories from Princeton WordNet. Wordnets typically do not contain prepositions, because they are difficult for processing, but their incorporation would seriously benefit the performance of wordnets for tasks such as text analysis and generation, word-sense disambiguation, automatic translation, etc.

Friday 12 August, 15:50–16:50

Beth Award Ceremony and Beth Lecture

Monday 15 August, 15:50–16:50

Proportionality in Liquid Democracy and Representative Democracy

Leyla Ade, Matteo Michelini and Pietro Vigiani

We compare liquid democracy to representative democracy with respect to a proportionality principle, according to which agents with higher stakes should have more voting weight. We provide a formal model of voting systems that models agents' uncertainty towards a voting issue as influenced by stakes in the issue. We formalise the delegation process in representative democracy and liquid democracy and prove that only the latter satisfies the proportionality principle.

Socio-political generics: essentialist implicatures or essentialist readings? Critique of Sally Haslanger’s argument on the meaning of socio-political generics

Juta Pulijana

I analyse Haslanger’s argument that socio-political generics give rise to essentialist implicatures. I argue that Haslanger’s proposal that generics deposit falsehoods into the common ground by conversationally implicating them is implausible. Rather, generics like the ones above are ambiguous between the descriptive and essentialist readings.

‘Like a N’ constructions: genericity in similarity (lightning talk)

Janek Guerrini

I examine English V + 'like' constructions. I analyze 'is like xe' as 'shares relevant properties with xe', which coheres with main psychological accounts of similarity (Tversky, 1977). I also examine the readings of indefinites embedded by such constructions ('look like a lawyer'). I argue that in the most salient reading of such constructions the indefinite receives a generic interpretation. This explains why they are non-increasing: from the fact that John looks like a British judge it doesn't follow that he looks like a judge. This also predicts, non-trivially and correctly, quasi-conjunctive narrow readings of disjunction: under the most salient reading of 'John looks like a lawyer or judge', John looks like a lawyer and like a judge. This is explained by the fact that the disjunction can go into the restrictor of a generic quantifier.

Tuesday 16 August, 15:50–16:50

Trovo vs. considero: Expressing subjective attitudes in Italian

Achille Fusco

Subjective Attitude Verbs (SAVs), like find and consider, are propositional attitude verbs which only embed subjective clauses (Sæbø 2009), including, crucially, clauses having a predicate of personal taste (PPTs, see Lasersohn 2005) as the main predicate. Since PPTs are often said to require a relativization to some ‘judge’ (Lasersohn 2005, Stephenson 2007a, 2007b), SAVs are conceived as being sensitive to such relativity. Although several formal accounts have been put forward, some fundamental aspects remain controversial. On one hand, some authors have denied that SAV-judgements imply a belief of the matrix subject (Bouchard 2012, Sæbø 2009). On the other hand, the nature of their selectivity is still unclear, given that ordinary gradable adjectives are also acceptable under SAVs: this fact has been accounted for in terms of a semantic ambiguity between purely dimensional and evaluative senses (Kennedy 2013, 2016). In order to address these issues, it is here proposed to frame subjective judgements in contexts of potential doxastic conflict, i.e., situations where a speaker holds a belief that p but, for some reasons, her perceptual experience (temporarily) suggests that ¬p. Results from an experimental study conducted in Italian, testing native speakers’ acceptability intuitions on such constructions, suggest that trovo (‘find’) differs from considero (‘consider’) in that it lacks a doxastic component. Furthermore, the supposed polysemy of gradable adjectives proposed by Kennedy (2013) was not sufficient to explain the results obtained.

Whether-exclamatives

Sara Amido and Sebastian Buchczyk

We propose a new category of exclamatives, whether-exclamatives, based on data from European Portuguese and Standard German. We argue that these seem to function as answers to polar questions only because they are coordinated structures in which the first conjunct is an (optionally) elided assertion that answers the preceding question.

Existential Generics and Information Structure (lightning talk)

Zhengjie Situ

Bare Plurals in English are ambiguous between a generic and an existential interpretation. Cohen and Erteschik-Shir (2002) claim that information structure completely determines which reading is available: a topical bare plural is interpreted generically while a bare plural in focus is interpreted existentially. In this paper I argue that although their observation largely holds, several unmotivated assumptions about focus-topic articulation make the framework inflexible. I propose that an alternative framework that models information structure within discourse using questions, answers and answering strategies is superior in both explanatory power and empirical cover.

Wednesday 17 August, 15:50–16:50

A Logic of Permitted/Obligatory Assertion with Epsitemic Norms

Wenfei Ouyang

Based on a formal language of permitted announcements advanced by Balbiani and Seban, we propose a formalization of "it is permitted to announce something" with unary operators. To do it, we cut off the unary fragment of the language and give it neighborhood semantics. We investigate the definability of unary operators, two different types of update methods, and reduction theorems in this language. We also axiomatize the logic. As an application, we formalize some norms of assertion and the Moorean sentences in the language.

Unprovability of Continuation-Passing Style Transformation in Lambek Calculus

Masaya Taniguchi

Combinatory categorial grammar (CCG) includes combinators in addition to categorial grammar (CG), to accommodate various linguistics phenomena. For example, the type-raising rule realized by a combinator in CCG to exchange the argument--functor relation; such a rule is generalized as continuation-passing style (CPS) transformation. However, there is concern that CPS may exceedingly accept ungrammatical sentences. In this paper, we investigate the expanded grammar rules of CCG in terms of Lambek Calculus (LC), that is a formal system of CG. First, we show that Barker's CPS transformation is provable in LC but Plotkin's CPS transformation is not so. Second, we show a provable subset of Plotkin's CPS transformations . Due to the complexity of proving unprovability, we formalize the proof in Isabelle/HOL and verify it. We show that this subset is a grammatical class represented in LC, and call it type-restricted CPS transformation.

Evolution of Predicate Logic Notation (lightning talk)

Katia Parshina

While there is a lot of research on the ideas behind different systems of predicate logic, there is no research concerning the history of its notation. I analyze the history of the predicate logic notation and establish the main characteristics of the processes the notation has undergone in the past two centuries. I present the development of predicate logic within the two traditions of notations, Fregean and Boolean, and their subsequent unification into one. I argue that the term "evolution" can be applied to the processes within the development of predicate logic notation. I then analyze the evolution of predicate logic notation to determine which term can characterize the process more precisely: "cultural evolution" or "language evolution".

Thursday 18 August, 15:50–16:50

Poster session

‘Like a N’ constructions: genericity in similarity

Janek Guerrini

Diminutives at word level and root level: -er in Colloquial Beijing Mandarin

Yiyang Guo

A dynamic alternative-pruning account of asymmetries in Hurford disjunctions

Adèle Hénot-Mortier

Towards incorporating prepositions in BTB-WordNet – A case study

Zara Kancheva

Completing the Picture: Complexity of the Ackermann Fragment

Daumantas Kojelis

Evolution of Predicate Logic Notation

Katia Parshina

Existential Generics and Information Structure

Zhengjie Situ

Friday 19 August, 15:50–16:00

Springer prize ceremony

Springer prizes

Sponsorship and Prizes: Springer generously supports the ESSLLI Student Session by offering prizes for a total of €1000 in Springer books. The best poster and the best talk will each be awarded Springer book vouchers of €500 each. The prizes are awarded based on the reviews of the submission as well as the oral/poster presentation.

Proceedings

Edited by Dean McHugh & Alexandra Mayn

Proportionality in Liquid Democracy and Representative Democracy

Leyla Ade, Matteo Michelini & Pietro Vigiani

Whether-exclamatives

Sara Amido & Sebastian Buchczyk

Bootstrapping Icelandic knowledge graph data

Steinunn Rut Friðriksdóttir & Hafsteinn Einarsson

Trovo vs. considero: Expressing subjective attitudes in Italian

Achille Fusco

‘Like a N’ constructions: genericity in similarity

Janek Guerrini