In this talk, we shall give an overview of our work concerning type-logical grammars.

These frameworks are used in computational linguistics to model syntax using a strongly lexicalized style, properties (logical types) beeing attached directly to words. Type-logical grammars are also connected with logic, especially linear logic. For instance, parsing a sentence is similar to searching a proof, and semantics can be transparently mapped onto structure in the style of the Curry-Howard isomorphism.

A significant part of this work is connected to automatic acquisition (learning, grammatical inference) issues, and possibilities to help in the design of valuable grammars.

In more details, among the formal and computational issues underlying these systems and some specific subclasses, we have been involved in these questions:

• (i) relations between classes (or subclasses) of grammars, language hierarchies, language decidability questions;
• (ii) relations among types assigned to words, given a grammar system based on a type calculus;
• (iii) learnability from strings of subclasses of grammars (given that the whole class is usually not learnable from "raw texts" as positive examples);
• (iv) structures and learnability for subclasses of grammars (subclasses unlearnable from strings, may become learnable from adequate structures -or properly annotated texts-);
• (v) other type systems (adding type constructors and their rules);
• (vi) exploiting logical views (composing calculus and browsing, maintaining a categorial grammar)

A lot of this work has been performed in collaboration, in particular with the Gracq group (ARC Inria "acquisition de grammaires catégorielles"), then with the TALN team at LINA and with the LIS team at Irisa; on the computational side, we have also taken part in the design of prototypes, in collaboration with these two teams; small demos are possible.

Jury
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Alexander Clark, university "Royal Holloway" of London, UK (reviewer)
Marie-Odile Cordier, university of Rennes 1 (jury president)
Alexandre Dikovsky, university of Nantes
Alain Lecomte, university of Paris 8  (reviewer)
Gerald Penn, university of Toronto, Canada  (reviewer)
Christian Retoré, university of Bordeaux 1
Olivier Ridoux, university of Rennes 1