Nissim Francez

Nissim Francez (; born 19 January 1944 in Bulgaria) is an Israeli professor, emeritus in the computer science faculty at the Technion, and former head of computational linguistics laboratory in the faculty.

Education and career He received his B.Sc. in mathematics and philosophy from the Hebrew University, Jerusalem in 1965. After his military service in the Israel Defense Forces, he studied at the Department of Applied Mathematics at the Weizmann Institute, Rehovot, and received his M.sc. in 1971.

He continued his studies there and received his Ph.D. degree in 1976 under the supervision of Prof. Amir Pnueli.

In 1991 he became a full professor at the Computer Science Faculty in the Technion, and from 1996 to 2006 he was the head of the Computational Linguistics Laboratory at the faculty. Francez held the Bank Leumi chair in Computer Science in the faculty from 2000 until 2010, when he retired from the Technion as professor emeritus.

In his sabbaticals and summer leaves, Francez has been a research associate at Aiken Computation Lab. at Harvard University in the summers of 1981 and 1982. He was also a visiting scientist at Abo Academy, Turku, Finland (1988) and at the Department of Computer Science, University of Utrecht, The Netherlands (1992). Francez was an Honorary Visiting Professor at the Department of CS, Manchester University (1996-1997), and a Senior Academic Visitor at HCRC, Department of Informatics, Edinburgh University (2002) and at the School of Computer Science, St Andrews University (2007).

Francez’s initial research focused on the semantics of programming languages, program verification, and concurrency theory. and the textbook Program Verification (1992) provided systematic treatments of methods and tools for proving program correctness, including for concurrent and distributed systems. In this period, he also contributed to logic programming and published on the direct verification of program properties, such as in Acta Informatica (1983).

In the 1990s, Francez extended his research into computational linguistics, focusing on the formal representation of natural language syntax and semantics. He worked with unification-based grammar formalisms, including Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) and Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG), contributing to their theoretical foundations and linguistic applications.

Since the early 2000s, Francez has been a leading figure in the development of proof-theoretic semantics, an alternative to truth-conditional semantics that defines meaning through inference rules. He applied proof-theoretic semantics to natural language phenomena such as quantifier scope ambiguity, adjectival modification, domain restriction, omitted arguments, and contexts blocking entailment.

In parallel, he contributed to type-logical grammar, exploring how function–argument structures can be used to assign semantic values compositionally, in line with Frege’s Context Principle. This approach emphasized meaning as determined by introduction rules in natural deduction rather than by model-theoretic semantics.

His co-authored book with Shuly Wintner, Unification Grammars (2011), offered a mathematically rigorous introduction to the field and has been widely cited.

In more recent years, Francez has devoted considerable attention to connexive logics, a non-classical family of logical systems that reject paradoxes of implication in classical logic, such as the principle that “if not-A, then A implies B.” His work develops proof-theoretic foundations for connexive reasoning, aligning with his broader program of defining meaning through inference rules. This line of research culminated in his book A View of Connexive Logics (2021), which offers a systematic exposition of the field, situates connexive principles within the history of logic, and explores their relevance for both philosophical and computational applications.

Selected bibliography Books

Articles