Bridge: Language to Logic via Contexts and Ontologies

Bridge: Language to Logic via contexts and ontologies

Valeria de Paiva, Cuil, Inc.

For many years (from 2000 to May 2008) I worked in (Xerox) PARCs natural language processing group on technologies for(automatically) creating logical forms out of natural language sentences. Work in large industrial research labs can be derailed for all sorts of reasons: funding, re-organizations, political expediency, even scientific discoveries. My work at PARC was no exception. Two years after leaving the lab, it seems a good idea to try to summarize what I believe has been achieved and to chart feasible paths for continuing the sensible lines of research. In particular I would like to set the scene using the big project, but I will concentrate on its logical aspects, which tend to be neglected often times.

Valeria de Paiva is a mathematician and computer scientist based in Cupertino, CA. She works as a search analyst for Cuil, Inc.in Menlo Park, CA. She was (until 2nd May 2008) a research scientist at the Intelligent Systems Laboratory of PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), California. She received her PhD in Mathematics from Cambridge University for work on "Dialectica Categories", and has ever since worked on logical approaches to computation, especially using Category Theory. She is also an Honorary Research Fellow at the School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham, UK.