Some background

• Richard Montague
• Lecture notes early nineties - Cooper, Robin, Ian Lewin and Alan Black (1993) Prolog and Natural Language Semantics (gzipped postscript)
  Program till detta
• Patrick Blackburn (patrick@coli.uni-sb.de) and Johan Bos (bos@coli.uni-sb.de) Representation and Inference for Natural Language: A First Course in Computational Semantics
• Latest version of Blackburn and Bos' programs (ahead of the book draft)
• Extra programs improving or adding to the latest version of Blackburn and Bos' programs
• The course Formell semantik in the computational linguistics programme

Topics for this talk

• Evaluating first order logic in a database
• Implementing a variant of the lambda calculus and beta-reduction
• Relating the lambda calculus to natural language syntax
• A grammar engineering approach

Some issues for comparison with functional programming

• Advantages and disadvantages of prolog unification (the bound variable problem)
• Potential advantage of using a typed language to implement typed lambda calculus
• Can Haskell code linguistic rules as neatly as or more neatly than prolog?

Evaluating first order logic in a database

Implementing a variant of the lambda calculus and beta-reduction

Relating the lambda calculus to natural language syntax

A grammar engineering approach

Future work