Functional programming and formal linguistics

The philosopher Richard Montague began his 1970 paper "Universal Grammar" with the following (at the time, controversial) claim:

"There is in my opinion no important theoretical difference between natural languages and the artificial languages of logicians; indeed, I consider it possible to comprehend the syntax and semantics of both kinds of language within a single natural and mathematically precise theory."

 

In this class, we'll update Montague's claim for the 21st century: there's no important difference between natural languages and the programming languages of computer scientists. Concretely, we'll explore connections between the formal tools used for modelling the syntax and semantics of natural languages and the so-called 'functional' programming paradigm. This will be a practical class in which we'll first develop a working knowledge of the functional programming language Haskell, drawing from recent popular textbooks and online resources. We'll use Haskell to implement simple algorithms taken from linguistic theory, focusing on logic and semantics. Material will be drawn from van Eijck and Unger's 2012 textbook "Computational Semantics with Functional Programming".