Probabilistic compositional semantics, purely

• Event: Seminar
• Lecturer: Julian Grove, University of Gothenburg
• Date: 10 November 2021
• Duration: 2 hours
• Venue: Gothenburg and Online

Abstract: This talk showcases some work currently being done with Jean-Philippe Bernardy. We provide a general framework for the integration of formal semantics based on the simply typed λ-calculus with probabilistic reasoning. The framework is conservative, in the sense that it relies only on typed λ-calculus itself and is thus compatible with many logical systems already in use. The framework is also presented modularly, in that it regards probabilistic effects (i.e., sampling and marginalization) as /side effects/, using continuations. We show how our framework may be used to build probabilistic programs compositionally within higher-order logic and then illustrate its use on some applications (semantic learning/inference).