Learning Compositionality with Scala

Logical and statistical approaches to computational semantics have usually been considered orthogonal, but recent proposals are considering a synthesis of these perspectives by developing statistical models that are able to learn compositional semantics. In this talk we will show how it is possible to implement some of these techniques in the Synthesis framework proposed by Liang and Potts (2015) with a statically typed, functional language as Scala, and we will explore the extension of the implementation with algebraic constructs using a category-theoretic perspective. In particular, we will argue that precisely the functional paradigm with static typing provide natural solutions that are of great interest to many aspects of computational semantics and pragmatics.