VieCtoS is a system producing spoken utterances in German from information stored in a database. An important aspect of the system is the use of information relevant for intonation at all stages of the generation process. Prosodic features are derived from pragmatic information available in the strategic generator, and transformed by the tactical generator into features that can be interpreted ...

In recent years, so-called "effectiveness studies," also called "real-world studies" or "pragmatic trials," have gained increasing importance in the context of evidence-based medicine. These studies follow less restrictive methodological standards than phase III studies in terms of patient selection, comedication, and other design issues, and their results should therefore be better generalizab...

The purpose of the present article is to examine the implications of the pragmatic web for the research and development of educational technology. It is argued that, beyond knowledge acquisition and social participation, technology-mediated learning environments based on a semantic and pragmatic web have the potential for facilitating creation and advancement of knowledge. In order to capitaliz...

Clinical trials have been the main tool used by the health sciences community to test and evaluate interventions, Trials can fall into two broad categories: pragmatic and explanatory. Pragmatic trials are designed to evaluate the effectiveness of interventions in real-life routine practice conditions, whereas explanatory trials aim to test whether an intervention works under optimal situations....

This paper describes a framework for recognizing contradictions between multiple text sources by relying on three forms of linguistic information: (a) negation; (b) antonymy; and (c) semantic and pragmatic information associated with the discourse relations. Two views of contradictions are considered, in which a novel method of recognizing contrast and of finding antonymies are described. Contr...

In this paper we examine the connection between two areas of semantics, namely the semantics of historical databases and the semantics of natural language querying, and link them together via a common view of the semantics of time. Since the target application domain is an historical database, we present the essential features of the Historical Relational Database Model (HRDM), an extension to ...

Abstract Natural language negation is persistently negative in the pragmatic sense, and emphatic and attenuating negative polarity items modulate this effect in systematic ways. I use large corpora of informal texts with meta-data approximating features of the context to characterize this pragmatic negativity, and I attempt to explain it in terms of the ways in which negative sentences engage t...

Interlanguage pragmatics, as an inseparable part of communicative competence, has been emphasized as an ultimate objective in language learning. This study explored the perceptions of Iranian English as a foreign language (EFL) students regarding interlanguage pragmatics and the impact of textbooks tasks on shaping their pragmatic competence. To accomplish this objective, 137 senior EFL student...

BACKGROUND One of the most important ingredients of felicitous conversation exchanges is the adequate expression of illocutionary force and the achievement of perlocutionary effects, which can be considered essential to the functioning of pragmatic competence. FINDINGS The breakdown of illocutionary and perlocutionary functions is one of the most prominent external features of cognitive impai...

This paper outlines the basic features of Systems Intelligence and discusses some of its fundamentals. Systems Intelligence combines insights of Systems Thinking with a pragmatic orientation and philosophy of life. We argue that Systems Intelligence is a new concept that is highly useful for understanding human behaviour in complex interactive settings, and in concrete efforts to generate chang...