The Dutch Association for Logic and Philosophy of the Exact Sciences (VvL) is happy to announce the Logic at Large Lecture 2024. The Logic at Large Lectures are an annual, public VvL event for a broad audience, featuring prominent researchers in logic and its applications. The details for this year’s edition are as follows.
June 17, 2024, 16:00 CEST, online (Zoom)
Larry Moss (Mathematics Department, Indiana University, Bloomington): A Place for Logic in the Computer Processing of Language
Starting in 2018, computers have been able to carry out some tasks at human level (or better), tasks which are traditionally thought of as ‘logical’. These include the central task of logic: knowing ‘what follows from what’, when everything is presented in natural language. We therefore at a watershed moment in the history of logic. However, the computational systems — neural net learners — do not use logic in any evident manner. Of course logic is involved in computer science at many levels, but the particular programs involved in inference are much more like the ones that memorize patterns and classify objects. They do not use explicit symbolic reasoning of the kind logicians love.
Addressed to a general audience rather than to specialists, this talk is concerned with attempts by several groups of researchers to do reasoning in language on the computer, and to probe the deep learners to see how much they really can do, and to create hybrid symbolic/neural reasoning systems.
Please register through https://forms.gle/uUEFyAisxoxSZfnM8. We will distribute a Zoom link shortly before the event.
Organizers: Dominik Klein (d.klein@uu.nl) and Fan Yang (f.yang@uu.nl)