General Information
Instructor(s) | Pascal Amsili |
Place, time | Wednesdays, 9:30-12:30 am. Starting Sept. 20. ENS 29 rue d'Ulm, salle de séminaire du DEC |
Code | LING 102 |
Credits | 4 ECTS |
Major | Linguistics |
Prerequisites | Interest for linguistics (but talk with the instructor) |
Course taught in | English |
Teaching format | On-site teaching. Students who need to follow the class off-site should contact the instructor asap. See below for detailed course policies. |
Links | Moodle link / Cogmaster, Linguistic Major, syllabus, schedule |
Previous classes | 2022-2023 ; 2021-2022 ; 2020-2021 ; 2019-2020 ; |
Contrôles (assessment)
Modalités | There will be four homework assignments (worth 60% of the final grade) and a final exam (worth 40% of the final grade).
Homeworks can be handed in in class (paper) or on moodle (pdf format). On moodle the deadline is 23:59. |
Homework #1 (10-04) | automata (due October, 25); answers |
Homework #2 (10-25) | grammars (due November 22); answers |
Homework #3 (11-22) | pred. logic (due December 20); some answers for the first question; complete answers |
Homework #4 (12-20) |
grammar engineering (due January, |
Results | marks (instructions) |
Exam: answer | Here is a partial correction of the exam given on January, 17 (questions 1 to 5). |
Schedule (tentative)
2023-09-20 | Seminar room | Formal Language Theory (FLT): 1. Formal Languages | slides.
Also relevant: slides from an ESSLLI course. |
2023-09-27 | Seminar room | FLT: 2. Regular Languages | slides |
2023-10-04 | Seminar room | FLT: 3. Formal Grammars | slides ; same slides with scribbles |
2023-10-11 | Seminar room | FLT: 3. Formal Grammars (exercices)
FLT: 4. Complexity of NL |
same slides with a couple more scribbles slides |
2023-10-18 | Seminar room |
FLT: Complexity of NL (end)
First Order Logic (FOL): 1. Propositional Logic |
hand-out (prop) ; copy of the board exercises (prop. logic) ; answers |
2023-10-25 | Marbo, 29 | FOL: 2. Predicate Logic | hand-out (pred);
exercises (pred. logic) answers (partial) |
2023-11-01 | No class (public holiday) | ||
2023-11-08 | Actes, 45 | FOL: 2. Predicate Logic (end) | hand-out (equivalences) |
2023-11-15 | Berthier, 29 | Compositionality and λ-calculus (CLC): first contact | |
2023-11-22 | Berthier, 29 | CLC: Generalized Quantifiers | hand-out (fragment); |
2023-11-29 | No class (PSL Week) | ||
2023-12-06 | No class (Job prospects day) | ||
2023-12-13 | Seminar room | CLC: Untyped language ; Fragment (cont'd) | slides (pure language) |
2023-12-20 | Berthier, 29 | CLC: Fragment (cont'd) ; Time (and negation) | hand-out (fragment); slides ; second hand-out |
2023-12-27 | No class (winter break) | ||
2024-01-03 | No class (winter break) | ||
2024-01-10 | Curie C | Q&A session on the whole content;
Compositional treatment of quantification; Intensionality |
slides (quantification); slides (intentionality) |
2024-01-17 | Berthier, 29 | Exam |
Pointers (references, bibliography, online resources)
- About First Order Logic, a 28p. hand-out (in French) that may be useful.
- About regular languages and automata, a 30p. hand-out (in French) that may be useful (covers additional material and algorithms).
- Barbara Partee, Alice ter Meulen & Robert E. Wall, Mathematical Methods in Linguistics, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993.
- Gamut, L. T. F. (1991). Logic, Language, and Meaning, volume 1: Introduction to Logic; volume 2: Intensional Logic and Logical Grammar. University of Chicago Press.
- About the complexity of natural language, a relatively recent survey can be found here: António Branco, 2018: Computational Complexity of Natural Languages: A Reasoned Overview.
- For those interested in pure untyped lambda-calculus : The Interactive Lambda-calculus Tracer: TILC aims to be a friendly visual tool for teaching/studying main basic pure untyped lambda-calculus concepts.
- More directly relevant to the fragment construction process we've been practicing: the lambda-calculator (formerly the Penn Lambda Calculator).
- More about λ-calculus: very useful lecture notes from this class:
CS 152, Programming Languages (Harvard, 2016):
- Pure language,
- Combinators,
- Typed language (the last one is less relevant for us).
- A recent book about computability and complexity was recently published at MIT Press (author Hubie Chen), and the first part, which is published under a creative commons licence, is a very precise and complete chapter on automata theory. Available HERE.
Course policies
Some course policies are general to all Cogmaster courses. These common policies are:- Attendance is mandatory and verified. More than 2 justified absences means that students can no longer validate a course for credit (ECTS).
- Final grades below 6/20 are eliminatory (i.e. the credits cannot count towards the 30 ECTS necessary to validate a semester).
- There is no second session (“rattrapage”).
- The minimal penalty for plagiarism is the removal of the ECTS from the student’s course contract.
- Courses are indivisible; students cannot follow and validate only part of a course for partial credit.