A Natural Proof System for Natural Language
The doctoral dissertation was accomplished by me in 2012-2016 while being a PhD student in the TiLPS group at Tilburg University. My supervisors were Prof. Dr. Jan Sprenger and Dr. Reinhard Muskens. The PhD project was funded by the NWO grant.
PhD Dissertation
ISBN 978-94-6299-494-2
In the title of this thesis [see its front cover on the left], a proof system refers to a system that carries out formal proofs (e.g., of theorems). Logicians would interpret a system as a symbolic calculus while computer scientists might understand it as a computer program. Both interpretations are fine for the current purpose as the thesis develops a proof calculi and a computer program based on it. What makes the proof system natural is that it operates on formulas with a natural appearance, i.e. resembling natural language phrases. This is contrasted to the artificial formulas logicians usually use. Put differently, the natural proof system is designed for a natural logic, a logic that has formulas similar to natural language sentences. The natural proof system represents a further development of an analytic tableau system for natural logic (Muskens, 2010). The implementation of the system acts as a theorem prover for wide-coverage natural language sentences. For instance, it can prove that not all PhD theses are interesting entails some dissertations are not interesting. On certain textual entailment datasets, the prover achieves results competitive to the state-of-the-art. [The text is taken from the back cover of the thesis]
An online demo of the theorem prover LangPro is available here.
An electronic version of the thesis can be downloaded from here.
Public Defense
The public defense of the thesis is scheduled on Friday January 20, 2017, at the following address: the Aula (Auditorium) in the Cobbenhagen building of Tilburg University (Warandelaan 2, 5037 AB Tilburg).
The defense ceremony starts at 2 pm sharp with a layman's summary of the PhD research (this became compulsory since 01.09.16). Technically I am allowed to give the layman's presentation in Georgian. So, watch out :).
At 2:15 pm the actual defense of the thesis starts. The procedure involves rounds of questions from the non-(co)supervisor members of the PhD committee. The committee consists of Prof. dr. Jan Sprenger (supervisor, Tilburg University), Dr. Reinhard Muskens (co-supervisor, Tilburg University), Prof. dr. Philippe de Groote (LORIA, Inria Nancy), Dr. Richard Moot (LaBRI, University of Bordeaux), Prof. dr. Larry Moss (Indiana University) and Prof. dr. Yoad Winter (Utrecht University).
Schedule
14:00 - 15:00 Public defense at the Aula (Auditorium) in the Cobbenhagen building.
15:00 - 16:30 Reception at the small foyer C (near the Aula) including various drinks and snacks.
19:30 - ∞ Dinner at Sarban (by invitation).
For more information contact me @gmail.com prefixed with Lasha.Abzianidze