Carnegie Mellon University

Logic, Language and Information Experts Go To Summer School

July 16, 2018

Logic, Language and Information Experts Go To Summer School

By Stefanie Johndrow

Interdisciplinary at its core, the 2018 North American Summer School in Logic, Language and Information (NASSLLI) came to the place where collaboration across disciplines is second nature: Carnegie Mellon University.

Organized by Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences’ Department of Philosophy, NASSLLI was a week-long opportunity for graduate and advanced undergraduate students to explore the areas of logic, linguistics, computer science, formal epistemology, cognitive science, philosophy and the intersections between them.

“The topics which NASSLLI centers on — logic, linguistics, formal epistemology and computational methodologies — are a perfect match for the foci of the Department of Philosophy, said Mandy Simons, professor of philosophy and chair of the organizing committee. “I had realized that the broader NASSLLI community wasn’t really familiar with our department, so I wanted to bring NASSLLI here to make that connection. Plus, the NASSLLI crowd is made up of really great people, and I knew it would be fun to have them here.”

NASSLLI

NASSLLI’s 250 participants had their choice of 28 courses taught by more than 40 instructors. Courses were offered in the areas of logic and epistemology, logic and computation, computational linguistics and semantics and pragmatics.

Instructors included faculty members from CMU’s Departments of Philosophy and Modern Languages and the Language Technologies Institute, as well as prominent international researchers, including Bart Guerts, professor of philosophy of mind and language at Radboud University; Rineke Verbrugge, professor of logic and cognition in the Department of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Groningen; and Kemal Oflazer, head of the Computer Science Program at CMU-Qatar.

Pictured above: Patrick Blackburn, professor of philosophy at Roksilde University in Denmark, provided a high-level introduction to hybrid logic.

View a full list of instructors »

NASSLLI

Students came from different parts of the world and gave poster presentations on topics ranging from understanding code-mixed dialogues to deriving free relatives in minimalist grammars and English acronyms in Chinese text and speech.

NASSLLI

NASSLI 2018 concluded with a reception in the Cohon University Center’s Rangos Ballroom, where participants enjoyed food and reflected on the week.

NASSLLI was sponsored internally by CMU’s Department of Philosophy, Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences, the Office of the Provost and the Graduate Student Assembly. External sponsorships include the National Science Foundation, Citi Ventures, Roam Analytics, Duquesne University’s McAulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts and VisitPittsburgh.

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