Area C: Computation

The project area "Computation" deals with the development of computational models and procedures that make use of constraints and higher-order logical descriptions. Concurrency and resource-adaptivity figure importantly here. The project "Concurrent Programming Models" (Prof. Dr. Gert Smolka) investigates fundamental aspects of problem-oriented programming models. These models are closely related to the programming language Oz, which was developed at the German Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence.

A second project in this area is "Resource-adaptive Linguistic Inference" (Prof. Manfred Pinkal, Prof. Joerg H. Siekmann). The aim here is to devise efficient procedures for semantic evaluation in language processing which can yield results even in real time. In computational linguistics, up to now sequential procedures have been used almost exclusively, while concurrent procedures remain in an experimental stage. The project "Concurrent Grammatical Processing" (Prof. Dr. Hans Uszkoreit, Prof. Dr. Gert Smolka) aims to break new ground here. The main goal is to simplify the processing of discontinuous constituents and positional variants and the construction of semantic representations in cases of multiple structural ambiguity. A further project deals with "Semantic Processing With Limited Information" (Prof. Manfred Pinkal). In this project, procedures for the derivation of the meaning of natural-language expressions on the basis of given syntactic and lexical information are being developed.