Colophon
Formal semantics (henceforth FS), at least as it relates to computational language understanding, is in one way rather like connectionism, though without the crucial prop Sejnowski’s work (1986) is widely believed to give to the latter: both are old doctrines returned, like the Bourbons, having learned nothing and forgotten nothing. But FS has nothing to show as a showpiece of success after all the intellectual groaning and effort.
On Keeping Logic in its Place (in Theoretical Issues in Natural Language Processing, ed. Wilks), Yorick Wilks, 1989 (p.130).
We wanted to be modern, we wanted to make the XML people feel like progress is indeed happening, we wanted to update our CVs with the latest trick.... So we looked into using XML as source for this document, and using something like DocBook to translate it into the PDF and HTML versions that we wanted to provide for printing and web viewing. Nice ideas, but our conclusion was that they’re not really ready right now. So in the end it was good old LATEX and TeX4HT for the HTML production. Thank you Don Knuth, Leslie Lamport and Eitan Gurari.
