Foundational Structures for Compositional Meaning

Lead Research Organisation: Queen Mary University of London
Department Name: Sch of Electronic Eng & Computer Science

Abstract

Words are the building blocks of sentences, yet meaning of a sentence goes well beyond meanings of the words therein. Indeed, while we do have dictionaries for words, we don't seem to need them to infer the meaning of a sentence from meanings of its constituents. Discovering the process of meaning assignment in natural languages is one of the most foundational issues in linguistics and computer science, whose findings will increase our understanding of cognition and intelligence and may assist in applications to automating language-related tasks, such as document search as done by Google.

To date, the compositional logical and the distributional probabilistic models have provided two complementary partial solutions to the problem of meaning assigning in natural languages. The logical approach is based on classic ideas from mathematical logic, mainly Frege's principle that meaning of a sentence can be derived from the relations of the words in it. The distributional model is more recent, it can be related to Wittgenstein's philosophy of `meaning as use', whereby meanings of words can be determined from their context. The logical models have been the champions on the theory side, whereas in practice their probabilistic rivals have provided the best predictions. This two-sortedness of defining properties of meaning: `logical form' versus `contextual use', has left the question of `what is the foundational structure of meaning?' even more open a question than before. This project has ambitious and far-reaching goals; it aims to bring together these two complementary concepts to tackle the question. And it aims to do so by bridging the fields of linguistics, computer science, logic, probability theory, category theory, and even physics. Its scope is foundational, multi and inter disciplinary, with an eye towards applications.

Meaning assignment is a dynamic interactive process involving grammar and logic as well as meanings of words. Both of the two existing approaches to language miss a crucial aspect of this process: the logical model ignores meanings of words, the distributional model ignores the grammar and logic. We aim to model the entire dynamic process alongside the following three strands of integration, foundations, and applications.

(I) In integration we develop a process of meaning assignment that acts with the compositional forms of the logical model on the contextual word-meaning entities of the distributional model.

(II) In foundations, we go beyond classical logical principles of compositionality and context-based models of meaning to develop more fundamental processes of meaning assignments based on novel information-flow techniques, mainly from physics, but also from other linguistic approaches and other models of word meaning, such as ontological domains and conceptual spaces.

(III) In applications, we evaluate our theories against naturally occurring data and apply the results to practical issues based on meaning inference and similarity, e.g. in search. To be able to work with logical connectives in Google, one needs to re-enter them by hand in the `advanced search' tab, by manually decomposing the logical structure of the sentence and moreover providing the extra context for their different meanings. This is fundamentally non-compositional and goes against the spirit of automated search. It is exactly here that the lack of compositional methods in meaning assignment causes practical problems and where our compositional methods become of use. Hence, we aim to put forward our results to tackle such problems, e.g. to be able to use our sentence similarity models for paraphrasing, question-answering, and retrieving documents that have the same meaning and/or are about the same subject. Our proposed partnership with Google, ensures access to real life data and helps implementation and applicability of our methods in small and large scales.

Planned Impact

On the knowledge side, the proposed research will cause significant scientific advances across different disciplines of logic, linguistics, mathematics, physics, and computer science. This is by modeling the process of cognition and natural language generation and developing new mathematics, logic, and high level diagrammatic tools.

The project has 3 partners, from Computer Science in Cambridge, Cognitive Sciences and Artificial Intelligence in Utrecht, and industry in Google. These extend the geographical boundaries of the impacts of the project from UK to Europe and the US, but also from academia to industry. I also have on-going collaborations with experts from these various disciplines in venues including UK, Italy, France, USA, and Canada.

On the economy and social side, internet with its huge pool of services and data has become an inseparable part of our daily lives. The theoretical results of this project will be put forward to improve the quality of services on the internet. At the moment documents are identifies as bags of their words. If the relationships between the words is also taken into account, language processing tasks will hugely benefit, for instance tasks such as information retrieval from text and document search. As a result, new techniques for applications such as question answering and textual entailment will be developed, better answers to online questions will be provided, and more comprehensible summaries of news and articles will be constructed automatically. The partnership with Google and Cambridge is exactly towards following and realizing this pathway.

From the other side of the spectrum, the results will help us understand the nature of intelligence and language understanding. This has conceptual importance of its own, will improve the quality of human life in due time, by facilitating mutual understanding in society and across societies of different languages.

Finally, the proposed theoretical setting is based on using simple diagrammatic techniques to depict mathematical structure and logic. The simplicity and accessibility of these methods provides the public with a chance to understand advanced academic developments, a chance which will have an impact on educating the society. We have had open sessions to introduce Computer Science research to high school students and especially to girls in Oxford. The diagrammatic methods and their application areas caused much discussion with and within the students.

On the academic side, apart from publishing articles and attending already-established workshops and conferences, I have asked for funding to organize two workshops. This is to fill the interdisciplinary gap and bring together researchers from the different disciplines of the project, so that we can discuss and disseminate ideas and results and help start a multi-subject community across these different fields. I will also organize the interdisciplinary seminar series of the logic group of computing lab at oxford. These are open to all academic fields and also the public. Other impacts are through training and teaching. I have asked funding for a doctorate student and plan to continue lecturing my field of expertise based on the project. I have already been invited to give advanced lecture series about the subject in Utrecht and in a Masters course in Cognitive Science in University of Latvia.

Publications

10 25 50
 
Description In 2020-2021, with PhD students we extended the setting to discourse phenomena such as anaphora and ellipsis. We developed vector semantics for a new logic that has not been used for this purpose before and experimented with it in disambiguation tasks.

We have had three recent findings:
1- The tensor-based models of compositional distributional semantics, inspired by mathematical models of quantum mechanics, can reason about entailment as well as similarity.
2- The similarity measures used by compositional distributional semantics are mathematically the same as the relvance measures used in Information Retrieval.
3- Adding bi-algebtas to the setting of compact closed categories enables the underlying compositional distributional semantics to reason about quantifiers.
Exploitation Route The findings of the first category above can be applied to entailment tasks other than the ones we have considered.

The findings of the second category should be applied to retrieval datasets and have great potential to improve performance of search engines.

For the third category, the theoretical predictions of the model need to be experimentally evaluated.
Sectors Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software)

URL https://msadrzadeh.com
 
Description In summer 2014, comanies ClotheNetwork and TelRock decided to implement the academic developments of the project (compositional vector models of natural language) as part of the prototype they were making for their Artificial Intelligence product. They hired a student of me as one of their summer interns and also paid me consultancy fees. In 2017 I was awarded a Royal Academy of Engineering Industrial Partnership Fellowship to work with the BBC R&D, as a result I have been working on content similarity of programmes and on improving their named entity tagger, I brought projects to students of my course to QMUL and also to Masters students. In 2019 I was awarded a second Royal Academy of Engineering Industrial Partnership Fellowship to work with the BBC R&D on their recommender systems. As a result of findings listed above, we will work a range of vector methods, but compositional and tensor methods will also be tested. These latter need a substantial computational resource and thus are not very efficient to consider as our main tools.
First Year Of Impact 2017
Sector Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software),Retail
Impact Types Cultural

Societal

Economic

 
Description Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFSOR) International Grant
Amount £300,000 (GBP)
Funding ID ECSR1B1R 
Organisation University of Oxford 
Sector Academic/University
Country United Kingdom
Start 05/2014 
End 06/2017
 
Description BLC
Amount £200 (GBP)
Organisation British Logic Colloquium 
Sector Charity/Non Profit
Country United Kingdom
Start 03/2014 
End 04/2014
 
Description British-Dutch Scientific Collaboration Scheme
Amount £7,000 (GBP)
Organisation British Council 
Department British Council and Platform Beta Techniek
Sector Charity/Non Profit
Country United Kingdom
Start 09/2010 
End 10/2010
 
Description Cross Domain Unified Representations for Content Similarity
Amount £50,000 (GBP)
Funding ID IF\192058 
Organisation Royal Academy of Engineering 
Sector Charity/Non Profit
Country United Kingdom
Start 08/2019 
End 08/2020
 
Description Multi-modal content similarity for predicting audience behaviour
Amount £87,696 (GBP)
Funding ID 20000034 
Organisation Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) 
Sector Public
Country United Kingdom
Start 09/2020 
End 08/2024
 
Description Wolfson College Oxford
Amount £600 (GBP)
Funding ID Workshop Funds 
Organisation University of Oxford 
Department Wolfson College
Sector Charity/Non Profit
Country United Kingdom
Start 08/2009 
End 09/2009
 
Title Binary Entailment 
Description Two datasets of intransitive and transitive pairs of sentences that fully entail each other. 
Type Of Material Database/Collection of data 
Provided To Others? No  
Impact This is again midways between a dataest of pairs of words that entail each other and pairs of long sentences that do. It is designed to measure the effectivity of tensor-based composition operators in entailment tasks. 
 
Title Fuzzy Entailment 
Description Two datasets: one of intransitive sentenes and phrases and another of transitive sentences that entail each other. Gold standards are collected for degrees of entailment between the pairs of phrases and sentences from Amazon Mechanical Turk. 
Type Of Material Database/Collection of data 
Provided To Others? No  
Impact This is a hand made entailment dataset, the first one that goes beyond words but does not consist of full blown large sentences of over 15 words. It is designed to compute the effectivity of tensor-composition methods for entailment tasks. 
 
Title LACL and COLING datasets 
Description three datasets of subject-verb, verb-object, and subject-verb-object upward entailment 
Type Of Material Database/Collection of data 
Year Produced 2016 
Provided To Others? Yes  
Impact evaluating entailment on phrase and sentence level, using compositional tensor based methods. 
URL http://compling.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/resources/
 
Title NAACL Datasets for Disambiguation and Similarity for Sentences with Elliptical Phrases 
Description A set of pairs of sentences with elliptical phrases, ranked by their degrees of similarity by human annotators, based on two tasks: verb disambiguation and sentence similarity. 
Type Of Material Database/Collection of data 
Year Produced 2019 
Provided To Others? Yes  
Impact We found out that resolving the ellipsis will definitely improve the results of disambiguation and similarity degrees computed by the models. The way in which the ellipsis is resolved and the individual data points (vectors and tensors) used differentiate the individual results, but overall no matter what model or data used, adding and resolving ellipsis will improve these tasks. 
 
Title SVO relevance dataset 
Description This is a dataset of about 600 pairs of subject-verb-object sentences that are related to each other. These 600 are manually chosen from a set of 1000 for which gold standard human judgements were collected from Amazon MechanicalTurk. The judgements measure the degree of relevance of the two sentences, treating one as a query and the other as a document. 
Type Of Material Database/Collection of data 
Provided To Others? No  
Impact This is the first dataset that is designed to compare methods from Information Retrieval and from Natural Language Processing. It is under final stages and will soon be made publicly available and a paper about it will be published as well. 
 
Title Sentence similarity dataset 
Description This is a set of pairs of transitive sentences whose meanings range from similar to dissimilar. 
Type Of Material Database/Collection of data 
Year Produced 2013 
Provided To Others? Yes  
Impact The dataset has been used by other researchers in the community to validate their sentence representation models. 
URL http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/activities/compdistmeaning/emnlp2013_turk.txt
 
Title Transitive sentence dismabiguation dataset 
Description This was a set of pairs of sentences which has ambiguous verbs in them and the sentences where used to dismabiguate the verb. This was the first time transitive sentences were used in this task and our dataset was the first one of its kind. 
Type Of Material Database/Collection of data 
Year Produced 2011 
Provided To Others? Yes  
Impact The paper containing the dataset has about 100 citations now and various researchers in the field of natural language processing use this dataset to validate their sentence representation models and techniques. 
URL http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/activities/compdistmeaning/GS2011data.txt
 
Description Amsterdam 
Organisation University of Amsterdam
Department Institute for Logic Language Information and Computation (ILLC)
Country Netherlands 
Sector Academic/University 
PI Contribution A conference and a journal paper were published and a joint workshop was organized.
Collaborator Contribution A conference and a journal paper were published and a joint workshop was organized.
Impact A conference and a journal paper were published and a joint workshop was organized.
Start Year 2008
 
Description Barcelona 
Organisation University of Barcelona
Department Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science
Country Spain 
Sector Academic/University 
PI Contribution co-organizing the Workshop on Statistical and Logical Models of Meaning in the 7th North American Summer School in Logic Language Information in Rutgers University NJ, US. co-supervising a PhD student together
Collaborator Contribution Knowledge about type-algebras and their applications to linguistics, being a leader and a senior figure of the field and thus helping in mentoring
Impact we are now in the process of editing the proceedings of the workshop into a volume of the Journal of Language Modelling: http://jlm.ipipan.waw.pl/index.php/JLM
Start Year 2016
 
Description Cambridge 
Organisation University of Cambridge
Department Computer Laboratory
Country United Kingdom 
Sector Academic/University 
PI Contribution Working on the implementation and experimental part of the theoretical work proposed in my EPSRC project
Collaborator Contribution Developing a dataset of relative clauses from real large scale corpora and experimenting with it using the theory developed together.
Impact we are writing a paper together and have plans to submit it to a journal.
Start Year 2013
 
Description Chieti-Pescara 
Organisation University of Chieti-Pescara
Country Italy 
Sector Academic/University 
PI Contribution We work on pregroup models of natural language together, a work that has resulted in the analysis of many languages such as Persian, Sanskrit, Hungarian, and also French and Italian.
Collaborator Contribution We work on pregroup models of natural language together, a work that has resulted in the analysis of many languages such as Persian, Sanskrit, Hungarian, and also French and Italian.
Impact Conference and Festschrift papers, listed in the publication section.
Start Year 2010
 
Description Elisabetta 
Organisation University of Padova
Country Italy 
Sector Academic/University 
PI Contribution Collaborating on two articles
Collaborator Contribution expertise on the linguistic side of the research
Impact two working papers
Start Year 2016
 
Description LORIA-Nancy 
Organisation National Center for Scientific Research (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique CNRS)
Department Lorraine Research Laboratory in Computer Science and its Applications (LORIA)
Country France 
Sector Public 
PI Contribution I was invited to visit Hans van Ditmarsch's group in LORIA for a week. My visit, including meals, travel, and hotel were fully funded by van Ditmarsch's ERC project CELLO. During this week, I gave a seminar and collaborated with two members of the group.
Collaborator Contribution The discussions with van Ditmarsh led to plans for organizing a workshop on Application of Modal Logic to Computer Science. The funding application for half of the expenses of the workshop is under review (submitted to CIMPA). Van Ditmarsch's project is to pay for the other half of the expenses.
Impact 1- seminar, 2- disucssions towards a paper 3- submission of funding application for a workshop.
Start Year 2015
 
Description McGill 
Organisation McGill University
Department School of Computer Science
Country Canada 
Sector Academic/University 
PI Contribution A number of conference and workshop papers were published and an MSc thesis in McGill was sueprvised.
Collaborator Contribution A number of conference and workshop papers were published and an MSc thesis in McGill was sueprvised.
Impact A number of conference and workshop papers were published and an MSc thesis in McGill was sueprvised.
Start Year 2007
 
Description Montpellier 
Organisation University of Montpellier
Country France 
Sector Academic/University 
PI Contribution We worked on categorical models of natural language.
Collaborator Contribution We worked on categorical models of natural language.
Impact Papers, listed in the publication.
Start Year 2010
 
Description Oxford 
Organisation University College Oxford
Country United Kingdom 
Sector Academic/University 
PI Contribution The collaboration is with `University of Oxford' not `University College Oxford', as indicated in the previous field, the drop-down list did not seem to have `University of Oxford' or `Oxford University' on its own. We work on the same categorical models of meaning.
Collaborator Contribution We work on the same categorical models of meaning. Our collaboration has resulted in coverage by the New Scientist Magazine, under cover heading `Quantum Linguistics, a leap forward for artificial intelligence'.
Impact conference and journal papers, listed in the publication section.
Start Year 2007
 
Description Pere 
Organisation Spanish National Research Council (CSIC)
Department Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (IIIA)
Country Spain 
Sector Public 
PI Contribution Working on planning using dynamic epistemic logic and supervising a phd student's thesis.
Collaborator Contribution Working on planning using dynamic epistemic logic
Impact Conference papers and a soon to be submitted journal version.
Start Year 2012
 
Description Prague 
Organisation Czech Technical University in Prague
Department Faculty of Electrical Engineering
Country Czech Republic 
Sector Academic/University 
PI Contribution giving seminars in Prague and London, working on a technical report that has led to a recent submission
Collaborator Contribution expertise on fuzzy logic and category theory
Impact Many Valued Generalised Quantifiers for Natural Language in the DisCoCat Model, Matej Dostal and Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh, QMUL Technical Report, 2016.
Start Year 2016
 
Description Tilburg 
Organisation University of Tilburg
Country Netherlands 
Sector Academic/University 
PI Contribution I visited Professor Reinhard Muskens and we collaborated on a paper.My expertise was the vector space models of meaning.
Collaborator Contribution Professor Muskens' expertise were lambda calculus models of natural language. It is the first time that these models are endowed with vector semantics.
Impact a paper in final stages.
Start Year 2015
 
Description Utrecht 
Organisation Utrecht University
Department Department of Languages, Literature and Communication
Country Netherlands 
Sector Academic/University 
PI Contribution co-organizing the Workshop on Statistical and Logical Models of Meaning in the 7th North American Summer School in Logic Language Information in Rutgers University NJ, US. co-supervising a PhD student together
Collaborator Contribution Knowledge about type-algebras and their applications to linguistics, being a leader and a senior figure of the field and thus helping in mentoring
Impact a workshop. we are now in the process of editing the proceedings of the workshop into a volume of the Journal of Language Modelling: http://jlm.ipipan.waw.pl/index.php/JLM
Start Year 2016
 
Title Aximo 
Description Automated software to check algebraic properties of pubich and private announcements in multi-agent systems 
Type Of Technology Webtool/Application 
Year Produced 2009 
Impact used during teaching in Oxford 
 
Title Compositional Distributional Vector Builder 
Description This software is developed by D. Milajevs, who is the PhD student supported by my grant. It inputs different copora of text and evaluation datasets, turns them into vector spaces, then outputs the results of the evaluation in tabular and graphical forms. 
Type Of Technology Software 
Year Produced 2016 
Open Source License? Yes  
Impact Softwares similar to this do indeed exist: the ERC project COMPOSES of Marco Baroni from the Center for Mind/Brain Sciences of the University of Trento is one such example. But it is the first time that one can input different copora and datasets, as well as normalization schemes, and compare the performances of models across all the parameters, and further, display the results graphically. 
URL https://fowlercorpora.readthedocs.org/en/latest/installation.html
 
Description ALCOP 
Form Of Engagement Activity Scientific meeting (conference/symposium etc.)
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Type Of Presentation workshop facilitator
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Other academic audiences (collaborators, peers etc.)
Results and Impact workshops brought together many people and sparked discussions across logicians in different departments, e.g. maths vs computer science and philosophy.

na
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2014
URL http://www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/~pbo/workshops/ALCOP2014.html
 
Description Conversation 
Form Of Engagement Activity A press release, press conference or response to a media enquiry/interview
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Media (as a channel to the public)
Results and Impact I was asked to write an article about the wikipedia's robot trained to distinguish malicious articles by the Conversation news website. I was provided access to professional article-writing facilities and given an editor. The article was received and I got good feedback from colleagues who read it.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2015
URL https://theconversation.com/profiles/mehrnoosh-sadrzadeh-210564/articles
 
Description Harrow 
Form Of Engagement Activity A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach Local
Primary Audience Schools
Results and Impact Giving a talk about Women in Computer Science to Bentleywood High School for girls
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2016
 
Description Invited talks 2 
Form Of Engagement Activity A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Other academic audiences (collaborators, peers etc.)
Results and Impact sparked discussions and collaborations

na
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2008
 
Description Logic and Structure in Computer Science and Beyond 
Form Of Engagement Activity A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Postgraduate students
Results and Impact Bridging different logical and computational methods developed for different fields as varied as quantum contextually, natural language, psychology and game semantics for programming languages and databases.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2019
URL https://132.229.214.8/lc/web/2019/1178/info.php3?wsid=1178&venue=Oort
 
Description PhysLin 
Form Of Engagement Activity Scientific meeting (conference/symposium etc.)
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Type Of Presentation workshop facilitator
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Other academic audiences (collaborators, peers etc.)
Results and Impact many disucssions betweem quantum physicists and computer scientists and linguists

Oxford University Press expressed interest in publishing the proceedings and a book was published
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2010
 
Description RI Master Class 
Form Of Engagement Activity A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach Regional
Primary Audience Schools
Results and Impact Giving a master class in the Royal Institute's initiative to high school students from around London
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2016
URL http://www.rigb.org/education/masterclasses
 
Description Royal Institute Master Class 
Form Of Engagement Activity A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach Regional
Primary Audience Schools
Results and Impact 30 pupils from schools across London attended my master class which was on Natural Language Processing. The EPSRC funded PhD student of my grant (D. Milajevs) and myself gave a master class of 3 hours with light theoretical content and hands on web-based and programming tasks.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2015
URL http://www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/public-engagement/ri-masterclasses
 
Description School Visit (Scurr) 
Form Of Engagement Activity A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach Regional
Primary Audience Schools
Results and Impact 30 pupils from the Scurr Highschool in TowerHamlets attended this masterclass, given by me. I repeated the material of my Royal Institute master class on Natural Language Processing, with light theoretical content and hands on activities.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2015
URL http://www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/public-engagement
 
Description Semantic Spaces at the Intersection of NLP, Physics, and Cognitive Science 
Form Of Engagement Activity A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Postgraduate students
Results and Impact Semantic Spaces at the Intersection of NLP, Physics, and Cognitive Science (SemSpace2020) was the latest edition of a series of workshops that brings together research at the intersection of NLP, Physics, and Cognitive Science. Using the common ground of vector spaces, the workshop offers researchers in these areas an appropriate forum for presenting their uniquely motivated work and ideas. The interplay between the three disciplines will foster theoretically motivated approaches to understanding how meanings of words interact with each other in sentences and discourse via grammatical types, how they are determined by input from the world, and how word and sentence meanings interact logically.

SemSpace2020 happened online and we had 100 people in the audience. A total of 14 academics presented their papers to this audience. The proceedings are being published as a special issue of the journal Cognitive Science.

Previous editions were held in 2019 (https://sites.google.com/view/semspace2019/home), as part of ESSLLI 2019, in 2018 (https://sites.google.com/view/capns2018/home) co-located with the International Symposium on Quantum Interactions 2018, and in 2016 (https://sites.google.com/site/semspworkshop/), co-located with the 13th International Conference on Quantum Physics and Logic (QPL2016) .

SemSpace2021 is to happen as a workshop of the 14th International Conference on Computational Semantics (14-18 June 2021).
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2020
URL https://sites.google.com/view/semspace2020/home
 
Description Tungsten 
Form Of Engagement Activity A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach Regional
Primary Audience Industry/Business
Results and Impact The fifth public Tungsten lecture was given by myself in the topic of Quantum Linguistics. The audience included academics but also business managers from Tungsten. The talk led to a long discussion afterwards and my team has since been in contact with the Tungsten research team.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2016
URL http://www.tungsten-network.com/tcida/uk/events/
 
Description Understanding natural language: logic or statistics, which one is more important? 
Form Of Engagement Activity A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Postgraduate students
Results and Impact A series of public talks called This Week's Discoveries held in Lorentz Centre in Leiden, open to university students and professors.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2019
URL https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/events/2019/12/this-weeks-discoveries---10-december-2019
 
Description invited talks 1 
Form Of Engagement Activity A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Other academic audiences (collaborators, peers etc.)
Results and Impact inspired discussions and collaborations

sparked industry collaboration
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2011
 
Description media interest 
Form Of Engagement Activity A magazine, newsletter or online publication
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Public/other audiences
Results and Impact family and friends who were not experts and colleagues who were not experts in the field got familiar with my research.

industry people approached me because of this article
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2010
 
Description online news 
Form Of Engagement Activity A magazine, newsletter or online publication
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Public/other audiences
Results and Impact People refering to my work and getting interested.

none yet.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2014
URL https://www.technology.org/2014/05/21/entanglement-quantum-phenomena-natural-language-semantics-enta...
 
Description online news 2 
Form Of Engagement Activity A magazine, newsletter or online publication
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Public/other audiences
Results and Impact make public familiar with my work

none just yet
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2013
URL http://www.technology.org/2014/07/29/algebra-bridges-syntax-meaning-natural-language/
 
Description school visiting department 
Form Of Engagement Activity A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach Local
Primary Audience Schools
Results and Impact few people expressed amazement of the multidisciplinarity of the subject

na
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2011