COMPOSE
COMPOSE is a browser-based companion for learning compositional formal semantics in the Heim & Kratzer / Coppock & Champollion tradition. Students compose a sentence's meaning bottom-up over a syntactic tree, choosing composition rules at each node; denotations are genuine typed λ-terms, so answers are graded by meaning (α/β/η-equivalence), not surface form.
How to cite
If COMPOSE plays a role in your teaching or research, please cite it:
The library
Everything lives in one app at compose.tstephen.com. The
starter page opens with a sample worksheet; the built-in library loads on
demand through fixed six-character unlock codes — enter one in the app
("⊕ Unlock with a code"), or open its /?code=… link or QR, and
the collection joins your sidebar. No account needed:
- Coppock & Champollion companion (§6–§13, all worksheets) — code
KT6WF4 - Heim & Kratzer companion — code
CETGZ4 - Classic papers (Partee 1986, Partee & Rooth 1983, Montague's PTQ, Davidson 1967, Krifka 1998, Barwise & Cooper 1981, Link 1983) — code
QIPYVM - the worksheet editor is the app's Author section — author and export .compose.json worksheets without an account; to host worksheets for a class, instructors sign in — see the guide
- /files — download every worksheet and bundle as .compose.json, plus the full site map
- /guide — the instructor guide: what students see, authoring, sharing codes, and hosting your own course (per-chapter codes are listed there)
- /help — student help: rules, symbols, grading, and worked derivation guides
Older links (/cc, /hk, /papers, the
chapter pages, /editor) still work: they forward into the app,
unlocking the right content as they land.
Accounts
Everything above works without an account — including the library's own unlock codes: every built-in worksheet, chapter and collection has a fixed six-character code (shown on its page in the app) that adds it to the sidebar of whoever enters it, account or not. An optional account (created from the app's sign-in page) stores: your email address, a password hash, your exercise progress, and — for class codes you redeem — which versions you are enrolled in. Instructor accounts additionally own the versions they host. The server sends no email of any kind: there is no address verification and no self-service password reset (a forgotten password is reset by the administrator).
Credits and lineage
The bundled worksheet library tracks Elizabeth Coppock & Lucas Champollion's Invitation to Formal Semantics (§6–§13) and Irene Heim & Angelika Kratzer's Semantics in Generative Grammar, plus a classic-papers shelf: Partee (1986), Partee & Rooth (1983), Montague's PTQ (1973), Davidson (1967), Krifka (1998), Barwise & Cooper (1981) and Link (1983). Textbook companions are original paraphrase — nothing is reproduced from the textbooks. Paper companions quote sparingly and with attribution: their notes contain only short attributed quotes (from the papers or published presentations of them), the papers' own numbered definitions, and explicitly flagged notes on how this implementation renders them.
COMPOSE is written in homage to the Lambda Calculator (Champollion, Tauberer & Romero), the classic teaching tool of this tradition.
Source
COMPOSE is open source: github.com/Vrier/compose (MIT). It runs on PocketBase behind Caddy.