Pithy paragraphs by president Porter

Roy Porter

Generating Coherent Argumentative Paragraphs

Q Should I take AI this semester? We address the problem of generating a coherent A If you want to take courses like paragraph presenting arguments for a conclusion in a Natural Language Processing or text generation system. Existing text planning techExpert Systems or Vision niques are not appropriate for this task for two main next semester, reasons: they do not explain how arguments can be i...

Generating Coherent Paragraphs

Recent years have seen something of a divorce between models of computer-aided instruction and theories of second language learning. For example, it has come to be recognized that a satisfactory model of language teaching must incorporate the notion of 'communicative compe-tence', that is, not only the production of grammatically correct utterances, but also the appropriate use of utterances ac...

Semantics of Paragraphs

We present a computational theory of the paragraph. Within it we formally define coherence, give semantics to the adversative conjunction "but" and to the Gricean maxim of quantity, and present some new methods for anaphora resolution. The theory precisely characterizes the relationship between the content of the paragraph and background knowledge needed for its understanding. This is achieved ...

Strategy as Action: From Porter to Anti-Porter

In the post-crisis era new concepts are emerging, while some old and dysfunctional ones are being discarded. Strategy is about making series of decisions that drive corporate action under specific coupling with company’s environment and context. Because decisions are actions, so the strategy itself is action, not just a description of action. In the area of traditional strategy, descriptions (i...