The Lost Combinator

Let me begin by thanking the Association for Computational Linguistics and its Executive Committee for conferring on me the great honor of their Lifetime Achievement Award for 2018, which of course I share with all the wonderful students and colleagues that have made many essential contributions to this work over many years. At the heart of the work that I have been pursuing over my research lifetime so far, whether in parsing and sentence processing, spoken language understanding, semantics, or even in musical understanding by machine, there lies a theory of natural language grammar that brings parsing, compositional semantics, statistical modeling, and logical inference into the closest possible relation. This theory of grammar is combinatory, in the sense that its operations are type-dependent and restricted to strictly string-adjacent phonologically or graphologically-realized inputs, and categorial, in the sense that those operands pair a syntactic type with a type-transparent semantic representation or logical form. I’d like to use this opportunity to briefly address three questions that revolve around the theory of grammar, both combinatory and otherwise. The first question concerns the way that Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG) was developed with a number of colleagues, over a number of stages and in slightly different forms. The second is an essentially evolutionary question of why natural language grammar should take a combinatory form. The third question is that of what the future holds for CCG and other structural theories of grammar in computational linguistics and NLP in the age of deep learning. I have called this talk “The Lost Combinator” in homage to the Victorian era poem “The Lost Chord,” in the hope of suggesting that the theoretical development of CCG has always been empirical, rather than axiomatic, in search of the simplest explanation of the facts of language, rather than for confirmation of linguistic received opinion, however intuitively salient.