Im Rahmen des Forschungsseminars laden wir recht herzlich ein zum Vortrag:

Dr. Christian Wurm (Univ. Düsseldorf) - Ambiguität

Abstract

Ambiguity is a pervasive phenomenon in natural language, and one of the basic problems when we try to make natural language arguments formally sound: it is generally thought that ambiguity makes sound reasoning impossible. We show that this is in fact not true: we devise a logic which extends classical logic with an ambiguity operator, which allows to represent ambiguous information. Moreover, we devise a Gentzen-style proof theory, and a semantics which we prove sound and complete for the calculus. Reasoning with ambiguity is thus possible, but some fundamental problems remain: even from axioms which seem to be correct beyond doubt, we can deduce some results which strongly contradict our intuition. This leaves us some interesting open questions, showing how little we understand of the true nature of ambiguity.

Apart from this, the results also have some intrinsic mathematical interest, as ambiguity corresponds to parallelism and self-duality in logic and algebra.

Speaker

In 2014 he completed his PhD in Theoretical Computational Linguistic at the University of Bielefeld.
Since 2012 research fellow at the Chair of Computational Linguistic Düsseldorf.