Genesis of Krifka (1990)

Im Jahr fahren hier…4000 Schiffe durch.

One of Manfred Krifka's many milestone contributions to semantics is his 1990 L&P paper "Four thousand ships passed through the lock: Object-induced measure functions on events".

Many know that paradigm example of the 4000 ships passing through the lock, but few know its origin. In 1986, IBM Germany decided that a hiker's guide to Alsace was to serve as a testbed and benchmark for the project LILOG (Linguistische und logische Methoden für das maschinelle Verstehen des Deutschen). See this excerpt. Manfred Krifka was not in LILOG but in LEX, but he was in the same house as the Tübingen leg of the project, a Jugend villa on the Biesinger Straße overlooking the Neckar.

 

 


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