Gabriel Gaudreault
I am no longer a master's student at Concordia University, Montreal, in formal linguistics; I now work full time as an NLU developer at Nuance Communications.
The two main projects I've worked on during my time at Concordia were:
Conjunctive Event Semantics for Pregroup GrammarsI worked on incorporating event semantics into pregroup grammars without resorting to the montagovian functional approach. Pregroup grammars are an interesting framework to do this in because of the "non-functional" aspect of their types and because of the syntactic hierarchy of types already in place which can be extended to account for semantic processes such as existential closure. I presented this work at LACL 2016 this december; you can find the slides here
Term-Calculus for Semantics in Pregroup GrammarI wanted to create a functional semantic calculus to combine with the pregroup grammar operations in order to allow semantic extraction of the logical form of a sentence, at the same time as doing a grammaticality check. The goal was to have a system 1) whose behavior was similar to the way semantic analysis is done using traditional categorial grammars and that 2) followed as closely as possible the internal structure of pregroup reductions, so as to keep a low overall complexity. The structure of this extra layer is inspired by the lambda-calculus, although there are major differences, the main one being used function compositionality as its main operation, which account for the compositional nature of pregroup contractions. For this to be done, the structure of pregroup types had to be changed and some traditional types dropped in order to make the system more logical and suitable for semantics. I presented this work at NLCS 2015, CoCoNat, and TOM 8.
Before attending Concordia, I completed a B.Sc. in Mathematics and Computer Science at McGill University. My main interest during those years was formal logic and its different forms and uses in fields such as mathematics, computer science, linguistics, and philosophy.