Abstract

Almost forty years ago Richard Montague proposed to analyse natural language with the same tools as formal languages. In particular, he gave formal semantic analyses of several interesting fragments of English in terms of typed logic. This led to the development of Montague grammar as a particular style of formal analysis of natural language. Pure functional programming languages are in fact implementations of the typed lambda calculus, and implementing a Montague style fragment of English in Haskell is a breeze. In the talk we will first explain the program of Montague style natural language analysis, and next show how this can be carried out with functional programming. Examples will be taken from a textbook on computational semantics, Computational Semantics with Functional Programming (CUP, to appear). Draft version of the book:

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