Thursday, 30 October 2014 | 17:30 to 19:00

The round table “Il tempo nel linguaggio” / “Time and Language“, organized by Tommaso Caselli (VUA, Amsterdam) and Rachele Sprugnoli (DH-FBK), will be held in Genoa on Thursday October 30 as part of “Festival della Scienza“.

Time is a pervasive element of human life that is also reflected in the language. But how time is encoded in the various languages ??of the world? How long is an event? What happens if we want to teach a computer to reconstruct the temporal order of events in a text? The philosopher of language Andrea Bonomi, the linguist Pier Marco Bertinetto and the computational linguist Bernardo Magnini will answer these questions to reveal to the public the role that time has in the language and the challenges of technology in this field. Philosophy, linguistics and technology come together and introduce the public to the fascinating relationship between time and language.

Speakers:

Pier Marco Bertinetto is Professor of General Linguistics (since 1981) and Director of the Linguistics Laboratory “G. Nencioni” at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa. Member of the Academia Europaea, the Finnish Academy of Sciences and the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Director of the Italian Journal of Linguistics / Rivista di Linguistica. President of the Societas Linguistica Europaea for 2009. He is the author of numerous scientific articles and organizer of more than 20 international conferences. He is interested in: experimental phonetics and phonology, experimental morphology, tense-aspect semantics and linguistic typology.

Andrea Bonomi has been professor of philosophy of language at the University of Milan until 2010. From 2010 to 2013 he taught semantics of natural languages ??at the University Vita-Salute San Raffaele in Milan. He has published numerous scientific articles and several books. Among these, is worth citing “Tempo e linguaggio. Introduzione alla semantica del tempo e dell’aspetto verbale” with A. Zucchi (Bruno Mondadori, 2011, Milan).

Bernardo Magnini is a senior researcher at the Fondazione Bruno Kessler in Trento where he is responsible of the Research Unit “Human Language Technologies.” His interests are in the field of Natural Language Processing, in particular the semantic interpretation. He launched the construction of computational resources for the Italian language and has coordinated several international research projects. It is an adjunct professor at the University of Bolzano and coordinates the Working Group on Natural Language Processing of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence.

Moderator:

Cristina Amoretti is a research fellow at the Department of Classics, Philosophy, and History at the University of Genoa. Starting from 2010 she is a joint member of the Steering Committee of SIFA (the Italian Society for Analytic Philosophy). She is interested in: philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, philosophy of knowledge and feminist epistemologies.

Location:

Palazzo Ducale, Sala del Minor Consiglio P.zza Matteotti 9, Genoa

Programme

18:30-18:40 Introduction and speakers‘ presentation by Cristina Amoretti

18:40-19:00 “La temporalità nelle lingue naturali” by Pier Marco Bertinetto [Slides]

19:00-19:20 “Quanto dura il presente?” by Andrea Bonomi [Slides]

19:20-19:40 “Il tempo nel linguaggio – La sfida tecnologica” by Bernardo Magnini [Slides]

19:40-20:00 Questions and answers