Jonathon Liu - DisCoCirc

Talk at Applied Category Theory 2023

DisCoCirc was proposed in The Mathematics of Text Structure [1] as a framework for language that is distributional (a.k.a. vectorial), and compositional in the same manner as circuits (i.e. process-theoretically, as in symmetric monoidal categories). It is a lean structure which aims to capture fundamental linguistic ‘connections’ between meanings (e.g. as described by grammar). Further, it can represent general text beyond just sentences and is therefore a significant evolution of the existing DisCoCat framework. Indeed, we believe that the 2-dimensional representation afforded by string diagrams is a more natural habitat for language than a 1-dimensional string of symbols, and that this passage from 1D to 2D eliminates much of the extraneous bureaucracy associated with grammar and other stylistic conventions.