Simon Charlow

Selected papers. See my CV or Google Scholar for a complete list.

Accepted

Under review/in progress

Published

Dissertation

[All materials are provided under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license]

Graduate courses

Seminars in semantics

Undergraduate courses

Invited teaching and minicourses

I'm an Associate Professor in the Yale Department of Linguistics and an Associate Editor at Journal of Semantics.

I'm a formal and computational semanticist working to develop scalable, compositional, and implemented models of how language is generated, parsed, and understood.

Programming languages are unlike natural language in many ways, but they are, after all, languages—with form, meaning, and a systematic relationship between the two. The connection between linguistic semantics and functional programming is especially close: in both domains, complex concepts or procedures are built compositionally, by iteratively applying functions to arguments. My research uses techniques developed for extending pure functional languages with 'side effects' as engines for better models of how natural language meanings are composed.

As long as I've been a linguist, I've been fascinated by quantification, scope, indefiniteness, anaphora, and ellipsis, interacting domains in which the relationship between form and meaning is especially rich, and revealing. I've developed new frameworks for doing semantics in the presence of dynamic effects (state) and alternatives (nondeterminism). I have longstanding interests and projects in Combinatory Categorial Grammar, (semantic) parsing, and continuations. And I am a fan of implementing semantic theories as runnable, debuggable code.

I teach courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels in formal semantics, computational linguistics, and general linguistics.

This website has info on my papers, teaching, and students. Further details of my academic life (including materials from talks) are in my CV. My github is here.

Email me at [email protected].

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