News

August 2022: Ian presented Joint work with Shane Mansfield and myself on `A Model of Anaphoric Ambiguities using Sheaf Theoretic Quantum-like Contextuality and BERT‘, in the End-to-End Compositional Models for Vector-Based Semantics workshop of ESSLLI 2022.

August 2022: I presented joint work with Hadi Wazni, Ian Lo Kin and Lachlan McPheat on `A Quantum Natural Language Processing Approach to Pronoun Resolution‘, in the End-to-End Compositional Models for Vector-Based Semantics workshop of ESSLLI 2022.

August 2022: I gave a talk on joint work with Wazni, Lo, and Mcpheat on Modal Lambek Calculus for Reasoning about Discourse, in the PhiLog Seminar of CUNY.

July 2022: Daphne Wang presented joint work on `Causal sheaf theoretic structures in natural language‘ in QPL 2022, Oxford.

June 2022: I presented joint work with Wazni, Lo Kin, McPheat on `A Quantum Natural Language Processing Approach to Pronoun Resolution‘, in QNLP Conference, Oxford.

March 2022: I started my Royal Academy of Engineering Senior Research Fellowship! For details see here and also here is the press release of Royal Academy of Engineering.

October 2021: Our paper `Enhancing Personalised Recommendations with the Use of Multimodal Information‘, joint work with Tanger Cagali and Chris Newell was accepted for presentation in IEEE ISM 2021 and will also shortly appear as an IEEE publication.

October 2021: Hopper 2021 is live! It is going to happen on the 14th of December as a UCL Zoom Webinar. Similar to previous years we are supported by UCL, IBM, and BCS. The speakers of this year are: Andrea Martin, leader of the IBM Watson Center in Munich, Neema Kotonya, who won Hopper’s Spotlight competition last year, Turing Fellow Prof. Maria Liakata from QMUL, and Royal Society Wolfson, Needham, Presburger, and Leverhulme multi award winner Prof. Alexandra Silva. If you are a woman research student at the MSc or PhD level, take part in our Spotlight competition, there is a range of cash prizes to win, see here.

October 2021: Daphne Wang presented our recent joint papers on Quantum contextuality in natural language data in the Mathematical and Computational Psychology Colloquium at Purdue University!

September 2021: Joint paper `Vector Space Semantics for Lambek Calculus with Soft Subexponentials’ with Lachlan McPheat and Hadi Wazni was accepted for presentation in LACL 2021 and will appear in its LNCS proceedings soon! It can be accessed from the arXiv through this link.

September 2021: Joint paper `Analysing Ambiguous Nouns and Verbs with Quantum Contextuality Tools’ with Daphne Wang, Samson Abramsky and Victor Cervantes was accepted for publication to Journal of Cognitive Science, with Martha Lewis and Michael Moortgat editors.

July 2021: Joint paper `Incremental Composition in Distributional Semantics’ with Purver, Kempson, Wijnholds and Hough finally appeared in Journal of Logic Language Information, see here, with Hannah Gibson and Chris Howes as editors.

July 2021: I presented our joint paper `Vectorial discourse analysis in Lambek calculus with a bounded relevant modality’ in the Logic Colloquium 2021, which took place as a hybrid online event in Poznan! The abstract of the paper is going to appear in Journal of Symbolic Logic.

June 2021: I presented our joint work on Quantum contextuality in natural language data in the Computer Science Departmental Colloquium, Middlesex University London.

June 2021: Daphne Wang presented our joint paper `On the Quantum-like Contextuality of Ambiguous Phrases’ with Samson Abramsky and Victor Cervantes in SemSpace 2021, the paper can be found here and is soon to appear in ACL Anthology proceedings of SemSpace.

May 2021: Joint paper `In Search of True Contextuality in Natural Language’ with Daphne Wang, Samson Abramsky and Victor Cervantes got the Outstanding Paper Award of Fourth Workshop on Contextuality in Quantum Mechanics and Beyond (CQMB) 2021.

April 2021:  My Discovery-to-Funding application got funded by UCL’s KE scheme! Many thanks to UCLB for their help with the application. With Taner Cagali and Hadi Wazni and in collaboration with BBC R&D’s Dr. Chris Newell and QMUL’s Dr. Sanjaye Ramgoolam we are going to use matrices to represent text and explore potential applications to recommender systems.

March 2021:  Paper `Anaphora and Ellipsis in Lambek Calculus with a Relevant Modality: Syntax and Semantics’,, joint work with L. McPheat, G. Wijnholds, A. Correia, and A. Toumi, was accepted for publication in the Journal of Cognitive Science. This was the project we did for the ACT adjoint school in the summer of 2019!

February 2021: I am chairing the E.W. Beth Outstanding Dissertation Prize committee again this year, see here for the call for nominations, hope to see your nomination there!

February 2021: SemSpace 2021 is happening as a workshop of IWCS. See here for a description and the call for papers.

Jan 2021: Our paper on multimodal content similarity and cosines finally appeared on the IEEE website, see here.

Jan 20201: Together with Alexandra Silva and Renato Neves, we are organising a logic@UCL event for the UNESCO World Logic Day on January 14th. Our event is called Logical Journeys, and is accessible here. The event was recorded on the Conseil International de Philosophie et des Sciences Humaines (CIPSH) website, see here.

Dec 2020: Our paper “Incremental Composition in Distributional Semantics” will soon appear in JoLLI, but can be downloaded from here too. It has been a joint collaboration with M. Purver, R. Kempson, G. Wijnholds, and J. Hough.

Dec 2020: Saba Nazir is going to present our paper “Audiovisual, Genre, Neural and Topical Textual Embeddings for TV Programme Content Representation”, in the 22nd IEEE ISM conference Dec 2-4. The complete list of authors is Saba Nazir, Taner Cagali, Chris Newell, Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh.

Nov 2020: Our CoNLL paper “Representation Learning for Type-Driven Composition”, joint with Gijs Wijnholds and Steve Clark, is going to be presented next week (19-20 Nov) by Gijs.

Nov 2020: I gave a talk in the LIRA seminar series at ILLC on Linguistic Matrix Theory.

Nov 2020: Lewis Sword and Sanjaye Ramgoolam, from Centre for String Theory QMUL, presented joint work on Linguistic Matrix Theory and Gaussianity and typicality in natural language data explained our GitHub code, accessible from here, as a Zoom webinar. The code can be used to compute the degree of Gaussianity of any ensemble of matrix data in a permutation invariant setting. A range of people from different industries attended the webinar. The funding for this project was provided by an SFTC/EPSRC IAA grant during summer 2020.

October 2020: In conjunction with BCS and IBM, we organised the 14th London Hopper colloquium as a webinar on the GoToMeeting system of BCS. We had 4 guest speakers from academia and industry and 12 PhD/MSc students won a place in our Spotlight competition to present their research. For the awardees of the Spotlight competition and an overview see here.

August 2020: Our paper Derivations and Vector Semantics of Anaphora with Ellipsis in Lambek Calculus with a Relevant Modality was presented in SemSpace2020 by Lachlan McPheat. The full list of authors: Lachlan McPheat, Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh, Adriana Correia, Alexis Toumi.

July 2020: Lachlan McPheat presented our Keynote paper “Categorical Vector Space Semantics for Lambek Calculus with a Relevant Modality”, in Applied Category Theory Conference. Authors:L. McPheat, M. Sadrzadeh, H. Wazni, G. Wijnholds. The longer version is accessible from here.

July 2020: Saba Nazir presented joint paper “Cosine Similarity of Multimodal Content Vectors for TV Programmes” as a poster in the ML4MD workshop of ICML 2020. The authors were Saba Nazir, Taner Cagali, Chris Newell and Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh.

May 2020: Our paper “A Frobenius Algebraic Analysis for Parasitic Gaps”, joint work with Moortgat and Wijnholds, is now on the arXiv, see here. An earlier short version of the paper was presented last year in the SemSpace2019 workshop of ESSLLI in Riga.

May 2020: Our paper “Gaussianity and typicality in matrix distributional semantics”, joint work with Ramgoolam and Sword from String Theory in QMUL, see here, has been accepted for presentation in the 17th International Conference on  Quantum Physics and Logic 2020, to happen online from Paris-Saclay, France, in June 2020.

May 2020: Our paper “Fuzzy Generalised Quantifiers for Natural Language in Categorical Compositional Distributional Semantics”, dedicated to my MSc thesis advisor, Prof. M. Ardeshir, will soon appear in the Springer Outstanding Contributions to Logic volume: Mathematics, Logic, and Their Philosophies: Essays in Honour of Mohammad Ardeshir, edited by Zareour, Rahman, Mojtahedi. It is joint work with Mǎtej Dostál and Gijs Wijnholds.

April 2020: Our paper “A toy distributional model for fuzzy generalised quantifiers”, joint work with Gijs Wijnholds, was accepted for presentation and publication in the Probability and Meaning (PaM) conference, to happen in October 2020, in Gothenburg.

Feb 2020: Our paper “Gaussianity and typicality in matrix distributional semantics”, joint work with Ramgoolam and Sword from String Theory in QMUL, is on the arXiv: see here.

January 2020: FoLLI’s call for nominations for the Beth Outstanding Dissertation Prize is out, click here for details of the call and submission criteria. Do consider submitting or encourage known students to do so. The deadline is 15th of April 2020.

December 2019: Together with Samson Abramsky and Alessandra Palmigiano we organised a Lorentz Centre workshop on Logic and Structures in Computer Science and Beyond, see here for the programme and description. We had a very nice combination of long and short impromptu talks, as well as very fruitful discussion and breakout sessions. I learnt quite a lot about contextually and Fock spaces.

December, I gave the Lunchtime lecture for the Lorentz Centre’s Faculty of Science “This weeks discovery”, with title “Understanding natural language: logic or statistics, which one is more important?”.

September 2019: I gave a talk in the Theoretical Neurobiology research group of the centre for Human NeuroImaging. The title of the talk was “Convergence in Dialogue via Incremental Vector Representations” and the material was based on our SemDial 2018 paper with Matt Purver, Ruth Kempson, and Julian Hough. Based on some recent joint work, I argued that a principle similar to the principle of free energy used by Prof. Karl Friston in the brain, can be applied to linguistic data exchanged by humans to achieve a degree of synchrony in dialogue, by measuring the decreasing rate of the distances between utterances vectors of the dialogue.

September 2019: I gave an invited talk titled “String diagrammatic reasoning in natural language processing” in the joint STRING-SYCO in Birmingham. It was a very nice event, thanks Dan for inviting me.

September 2019: As an affiliated workshop of TABLEAUX 2019 and jointly with Ekaterina Komendantskaya and Stephane Graham-Lengrand, we are organising a session in honour of Roy Dyckoff. Please consider participating if you knew him or his work.

August 2019: This week, Martha Lewis and I are teaching a course on Vector Space Models of Meaning in ESSLLI 2019 in Riga. We are also organising the 3rd edition of the Semantic Spaces workshop. I am honoured to give the 2nd evening lecture of this ESSLLI on Thursday the 8th.

August 2019: Today, I started my new job: associate professor in the PPLV group, Department of Computer Science, University College London.

July 2019: I taught in the Applied Category Theory School, the adjoint school of the Applied Category Theory Conference, in the department of Computer Science, University of Oxford. I had 4 students: Dan Shiebler, Aexis Toumi, Adriana Correia, and Lachlan McPheat. Together, and with the help of the TA of the course, Gijs Wijnholds, we worked on vector space models of language for dialogue and discourse, and discovered the role of coalgebras and Fock Space comonads on vector spaces. For a blog post on the n-categories cafe, see here. We are planning to write up the results soon!

June 2019: I was awarded a Royal Academy of Engineering Industrial Scheme Fellowship for the second time! This will start in September and end for a year and I will work on “Cross Domain Unified Representations for Content Similarity” with the BBC R&D’s Chris Newell and Andrew McParland. We are going to find a representation for different types of information encoded in a programme (TV, Radio, News) so that they correlate with the viewers’ behaviours.

June 2019: Our paper “A Type-Driven Vector Semantics for Ellipsis with Anaphora using Lambek Calculus with Limited Contraction”, has just appeared in Vol. 26 .Issue 2 the Journal of Logic Language Information. Thanks Roussanka and Michael for all their efforts.

2019: We accepted 13 submissions for our workshop Vector Space Semantics for Dialogue and Discourse in IWCS 2019! We have three keynote speakers, lightening talks, poster sessions, and a panel discussion. Check out the programme here.

2019: Watch the video of my colleague Sanjaye Ramgoolam from Centre for String Theory in QMUL, talking to the Plusmaths.org about joint work on the applications of methods from statistical physics to analyse natural language data.

April 2019: Our paper “A Generalised Quantifier Theory of Natural Language in Categorical Compositional Distributional Semantics with Bialgebras” has just appeared online in the journal Mathematical Structures in Computer Science, check it out here.

March 2019: I am chairing the third Symposium on Compositional Structures (SYCO 3) in Oxford. We have a very nice and even spread of topics on the theory and practice of category theory, do come by if you are around.

March 2019: Our volume of papers, edited with Glyn Morrill, on Statistical and Logical Models of Meaning has just appeared as a special issue of Journal of Language Modelling. Check it out here.

February 2019: Our paper “Evaluating Composition Methods for Verb Phrase Elliptical Sentences: has just been accepted for NAACL 2019! I will talk about it in my invited talk in IWCS 2019 in May in University of Gothenburg!

January 2019: I am giving a talk on our recent work on density matrices for entailment in compositional distributional semantics in Sussex’s Data Science seminar series today. The paper has appeared in Annals of Maths and AI, check it out here.

January 2019: I have been invited to give a talk in MFPS XXXV-CALCO 2019, to happen in London in June 2019.

December 2018: I have been invited to give an Evening Lecture in ESSLLI 2019 in Riga! Martha Lewis and I are also teaching a course on Vector Space Models of Meaning there, proceeded by an advanced workshop on applications of vector space models in different fields, see more here.