event calculus; tense and aspect
Mar. 28th, 2007 09:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
guslOne of the more interesting research going at the ILLC in Amsterdam is using event calculus as semantics for tense and aspect in natural language.
(I wish I knew the anonymous Wikipedian who added van Lambalgen's work to the event calculus article.)
Verbs come in several types, depending on the kind of event (point event vs continuous, etc)
An event-calculus-like thing is necessary for all intelligent creatures, because we need to do basic temporal reasoning (which is why van Lambalgen at some point called his course "cognitive robotics"). However, different languages differ in their implementations of this, i.e. they have different tense/aspect systems. These reflect differences in conceptualization of time. I should dig up study about some cognitive task in which Polish/Finnish children differed markedly, at about the same time they acquired a certain aspect.
I should read Piotr's thesis, especially sec 4.3, which introduces the Aktionsarten and logic programming formalism, and 5.2, which shows some computations: given a collection of sentences about time, does this conclusion follow (not deductively, but by common sense)? How do people compute the answers to such questions? The paper talks about default assumptions (negation as failure), but I haven't seen any mention of pragmatics.
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Robert Kowalski is an interesting person.
(I wish I knew the anonymous Wikipedian who added van Lambalgen's work to the event calculus article.)
Verbs come in several types, depending on the kind of event (point event vs continuous, etc)
An event-calculus-like thing is necessary for all intelligent creatures, because we need to do basic temporal reasoning (which is why van Lambalgen at some point called his course "cognitive robotics"). However, different languages differ in their implementations of this, i.e. they have different tense/aspect systems. These reflect differences in conceptualization of time. I should dig up study about some cognitive task in which Polish/Finnish children differed markedly, at about the same time they acquired a certain aspect.
I should read Piotr's thesis, especially sec 4.3, which introduces the Aktionsarten and logic programming formalism, and 5.2, which shows some computations: given a collection of sentences about time, does this conclusion follow (not deductively, but by common sense)? How do people compute the answers to such questions? The paper talks about default assumptions (negation as failure), but I haven't seen any mention of pragmatics.
---
Robert Kowalski is an interesting person.