AI Seminar - Nov 14 - 4pm-5pm

[Thomas Bartold]

Next week's AI Seminar will be given by Bill Rounds, a Professor in the lab.

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The Curious History of Feature Logic
Bill Rounds

Feature logic is a modal logic used to express constraints on feature
(attribute-value) structures, used in natural language processing.
The logic is used in a version of constraint logic programming
which implements unification-based grammar formalisms.

It didn't start out that way. It acquired relatives. It grew over the
years, too.

In this talk I'll:

Trace the sources of feature logic: logics for describing
discrete dynamic systems (automata, transition systems);

Show how an ancestor of feature logic gives a compositional
semantics for a simple concurrent programming language
based on CSP (Hoare's communicating sequential processes);

Show how feature logic is both a logic of action and a logic of data.
In particular, unification of feature structures corresponds to
parallel composition of automata.

Show how feature logic got to be nonmonotonic;

Tell what this led to in the end.