Richard Moot’s personal homepage

I’m a CNRS research scientist in computer science, working at LIRMM (Montpellier) as a member of the Texte team in computational linguistics.

Research interests

• logic, proof theory, proof nets
• proof theoretic aspects of categorial grammars and type-logical grammars
• parsing/theorem proving for categorial grammars and type-logical grammars
• computational linguistics

Current research

• TLGbank, a type-logical treebank for French,
• Wide-coverage syntax and semantics for French,
• The Grail family of theorem provers/parsers for type-logical grammars.
• Proof-theoretic aspects of type-logical grammars

The Grail theorem provers

A succinct summary of the different theorem proves I have developed can be found in the table below (see Moot 2017 and the individual linked prover pages for further details).

Prover	Logic	Code	ND	SR	Interactive
Grail0	MMCG	SWI Prolog	yes	yes	no
Grail2	MMCG	SICStus Prolog/Tcl	yes	yes	yes
Grail3	MMCG	SWI Prolog/XPCE	no	yes	yes
Grail Light	MMCG	SWI Prolog/Tcl/Python	yes	no	no
Linear One	MLL1, D, HTLG	SWI Prolog	yes	NA	no

• ND: prover has natural deduction output (true for all provers except Grail 3)
• SR: prover has user-defined set of structural rules (applicable to multimodal provers only)
• MMCG: multimodal categorial grammars,
• MLL1: first-order linear logic
• D: Displacement calculus
• HTLG: hybrid type-logical grammars

Wide-coverage parsing

Grail Light is a specialised, wide-coverage chart parser. It is designed to work together with a supertagger - essentially a probabilistic assignment of formulas to words - such as DeepGrail.

GrailLight also includes a semantic lexicon assigning a logical semantics in the style of Discourse Representation Theory to parsed sentences, making it a tool for wide-coverage semantics for French.

Slides and presentations

Slides for some selected presentations, some old, some new.

Selected publications

full publication list (contact me for author’s copies of pdf files)

• Moot, R. (2021), Type-logical investigations: proof-theoretic, computational and linguistic aspects of modern type-logical grammars, Habilitation à diriger des recherches, (HAL, pdf)

• Moot, R. and Retoré, C. (2019), Natural language semantics and computability, Journal of Logic, Language and Information 28(2), 287-307 (HAL).

• Moot, R. and Stevens-Guile, S. J. (2019), Proof-Theoretic Aspects of Hybrid Type-Logical Grammars, International Conference on Formal Grammar, 84-100 (HAL).

• Kogkalidis, K., Moortgat, M., Moot, R., and Tziafas, G. (2019), Deductive parsing with an unbounded type lexicon, Proceedings SEMSPACE2019, Riga, Latvia (HAL).

• Moot, R. (2018), Combining logical and distributional methods in type-logical grammars, Journal of Language Modelling 6(2), 287-317 (HAL).

• Moot, R. (2018), Chart Parsing Multimodal Grammars, (Github, HAL).

• Moot, R. (2017), The Grail theorem prover: Type theory for syntax and semantics, Modern Perspectives in Type-Theoretic Semantics, 247-277 (HAL).

• Lafourcade, M., Mery, B., Mirzapour, M., Moot, R. and Retoré, C. (2017), Collecting crowd-sourced lexical coercions for compositional semantic analysis, Proceedings LENLS 2017: Logic and Engineering of Natural Language Semantics, Tokyo (HAL).

• Moot, R. (2015), A Type-Logical Treebank for French, Journal of Language Modelling 3(1), pp. 229-265 (Github, HAL).

• Moot, R. and Retoré, C. (2012), The Logic of Categorial Grammars: A Deductive account of Natural Language Syntac and Semantics, Springer.