Speaker: Bob Coecke (Oxford)
Date and Time: Thursday, February 18th 2016, 12:00-14:00
Venue: ILLC Seminar Room F1.15, Science Park 107.
Title: In pictures: from quantum foundations to natural language meaning (this talk requires no background in physics, nor in linguistics, nor in fancy math!).
Abstract: Earlier work on an entirely diagrammatic formulation of quantum theory, which is soon to appear in the form of a textbook [1], has somewhat surprisingly guided us towards an answer for the following question [2]: how do we produce the meaning of a sentence given that we understand the meaning of its words? This work has practical applications in the area of natural language processing, and the resulting tools have meanwhile outperformed existing methods.
References:
[1] B. Coecke & A. Kissinger (2016, 900 pages, to appear) Picturing Quantum Processes. A first course on quantum theory and diagrammatic reasoning. Cambridge University Press.
[2] B. Coecke, M. Sadrzadeh & S. Clark (2010) Mathematical foundations for a compositional distributional model of meaning. arXiv:1003.4394.