Denotational semantics for languages for inference: semirings, monads, and tensors

Abstract: Computational effects are commonly modelled by monads, but often a monad can be presented by an algebraic theory of operations and equations. This talk is about monads and algebraic theories for languages for inference, and their connections to semirings and tensors. A basic class of examples of algebraic theories comes from considering the theory of modules for a semiring, e.g. the theory of unnormalized distributions, where the semiring is that of the non-negative real numbers. We propose that an interesting perspective is given by studying theories via semirings, and to this end explore several examples of subtheories of module theories, mostly relating to probability. Our main contribution concerns the commutative combination of effects, as studied by Hyland, Plotkin and Power: we observe that while the semiring tensor does not in general determine the tensor of subtheories of module theories, it still does in several fundamental probabilistic examples.