WORKSHOP DESCRIPTIONS

Language and Logic Workshops

 

"If...then...", Once Again: New Perspectives on the Logic, Truth Conditions, and Probabilities of Conditionals 

Giuliano Rosella and Vincenzo Crupi

In recent years, conditionals (i.e. sentences expressing a conditional relation between two propositions) have emerged as a powerful unifying thread across diverse fields like mathematics, computer science, philosophy, and linguistics. This workshop seeks to explore the synergies between these interrelated approaches and their recent findings on conditionals. Philosophical frameworks can illuminate the development of new theories and formal accounts of conditionals. Meanwhile, novel logico-mathematical tools can shed light on the properties and interconnections of conditional logics.

 

Truthmaker Semantic and Modal Logic

Alessandro Giordani and Vita Saitta

Truthmaker Semantics is an innovative framework addressing key philosophical questions about meaning and logic. It is emerging as a significant tool in philosophical logic and the philosophy of language, challenging Possible Worlds Semantics in areas like semantic and linguistic analysis, non-classical logics, and counterfactuals. The aim of this workshop is to address current studies on the application of Truthmaker Semantics to modal logic. It will include discussions on the philosophical analysis and the logic of modalities, such as necessity, possibility, obligation, permission, and knowledge. Moreover, we will focus on the relationships with the most popular semantic approaches to modal logic, such as Possible Worlds, Neighborhood, and Topic-sensitive semantics. Accordingly, the workshop aims to present recent developments, exchange ideas, and foster collaborations among researchers.

 

Language and Computation Workshops

 

Natural Logic Meets Machine Learning (NALOMA)

Lasha Abzianidze and Valeria de Paiva

There has been an ever-growing interest in tasks targeting Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Reasoning. Although deep learning models have achieved human-like performance in many such tasks, it has also been repeatedly shown that they lack the precision, generalization power, reasoning capabilities, and explainability found in more traditional, symbolic approaches. Thus, current research has started employing hybrid methods, combining the strengths of each tradition and mitigating its weaknesses. This workshop would like to promote this research direction and foster fruitful dialog between the two disciplines by bringing together researchers working on hybrid methods in any subfield of NLU.

 

Theory and applications of sheaf theory

Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh and Daphne Wang

Sheaf theory is a mathematical framework consisting of two or more layers: a topology endowed with data assignments, which can further be assigned more information such as probabilities. Inherently, it offers a computational model of syntax, semantics, and statistics all in one framework. Local and global quantitative measures can be defined over sheaves to calculate the distances between different interpretations at two or more of its layers. These properties have made sheaves desirable goto destinations for developing unified computational models, originally to unify different fields of mathematics (e.g. differential equations and logic), but also later of experimental data obtained form different sources (e.g. from structure and statistics). Different communities from afar fields have adopted them, examples range from analysis of engineering, e.g. for signal processing and in robotics; in science, most notably when analysing paradoxes of quantum theory, in the analysis of human behaviour in neuroscience, in social networks and also psycholinguistics, as well as recently even to coherent reasoning in large language models. The aim of this workshop we is to bring these different communities together.

 

Logic and Computation Workshops

 

Programs from proofs meets formal mathematics

Nicholas Pischke and Thomas Powell

Website: https://t-powell.github.io/ppfm/ppfm.html

The aim of this workshop is to bring together experts in proof theory whose research involves the extraction of computational content from proofs with specialists in formal mathematics and automated theorem proving, in order to facilitate an interdisciplinary exchange of ideas on the mutual benefit that these areas can have on one another. On the one hand, the workshop will focus on how methods for program extraction, particularly advanced techniques aimed at extracting computational content from large scale nonconstructive proofs in mainstream mathematics, can be implemented and partially automated within theorem provers such as Coq or Lean. In the other direction, we will explore whether the rich variety of logical systems developed by proof theorists for reasoning formally about program extraction could benefit the world of formal mathematics by both simplifying and streamlining the formalisation process, while building a library of formal proofs that are enriched with explicit computational content.