Linguistic side effects
Chung-chieh Shan , Harvard University
Abstract
How do expressions manage to both denote meanings and perform actions?
Researchers of programming languages have developed formalisms and
intuition to address this question. I use the same tools to represent
natural-language meanings, for applications such as question answering.
For example, pronouns in natural languages and variable references in
programming languages can both be thought to retrieve a value from a
storage cell in memory, and thus treated analogously. More generally,
_computational side effects_ in programming languages (like input and
control) are analogous to _apparently noncompositional phenomena_ in
natural languages (like questions and quantifiers). Both sides of this
analogy can be treated by giving expressions access to their contexts.
Just as the order in which a computer executes parts of a program can be
modeled in the same way for all computational side effects, the order
in which a human processes parts of an utterance can be modeled in the
same way for all apparently noncompositional phenomena. This notion of
processing uniformly accounts for such diverse phenomena as crossover
in anaphora, superiority in questions, and ordering effects in polarity
licensing and quantifier scope.
This application of programming-language theory thus unifies an
unprecedented variety of natural-language phenomena. In the opposite
direction, I will also mention how linguistic theory can help
programmers develop interactive Web applications.
Biography
Chung-chieh Shan is a PhD candidate in computer science at Harvard
University, advised by Stuart Shieber. He studies the syntax and
semantics of programming languages, especially computational side
effects such as control, as well as the syntax and semantics of natural
languages, especially apparently noncompositional phenomena such as
quantification.