This paper concerns the question of what it takes to be a degree modifier.1 In particular, I propose an account of why only certain predicates can be assigned degree manipulating functions. The proposal relies on a semantic typology of predicates which is based on the (monotonicity) inferences licensed by such predicates. The main observation is that on the assumption that any predicate could i...

This paper discusses efficient detection of global predicates in a distributed program. Previous work in this area required predicates to be specified as a conjunction of predicates defined on individual processes. Many properties in distributed systems, however, use the state of channels such as “the channel is empty,” or “there is a token in the channel”. In this paper, we introduce the conce...

This paper is the first in a series of two papers presenting recent developments concerning the interaction between aspectual classes of predicates and the semantics of aspectual forphrases. Aspectual for-phrases can felicitously modify stative and activity predicates, but not (basic) accomplishment and achievement predicates. Earlier literature proposed that this is because aspectual for-phras...

1. Old-Fangled Predicates Predicates are supposed to slice reality neatly in two halves, one for which the predicate holds, the other for which it fails. Yet far from being razors, predicates tend to be dull knives that mangle reality. If reality is a tomato and predicates are knives, then when these knives divide the tomato, plenty of mush remains unaccounted for. Of course some knives are sha...

Digital straight lines can be charactarized by Rosenfeld's chord property as well as Hung's evenness property. Both properties can be formulated in terms of linear inequalities. Because linear inequalities can be veriied by the predicates of a Gamba perceptron, this leads in a straightforward manner to the design of perceptrons that can recognize digital straight lines. In this paper we will di...

This paper takes into account the Wittgenstein’s idea of family resemblance as a particular crisp relation between some fuzzy sets, that is, between some representations of predicates use from its use. It is shown that all uses of the same predicate actually do have some kind of family resemblance, that some pairs of predicates cannot, and how the predicates migration between different universe...

Understanding and developing intelligent agents that simulate human learning has been a long-standing goal in both artificial intelligence and cognitive science. Although learning agents are able to produce intelligent behavior with less human knowledge engineering than in the past, intelligent agent developers are still required to manually encode much prior domain knowledge. We recently propo...

When answering queries in the presence of ontologies, adopting the closed world assumption for some predicates easily results in intractability. We analyze this situation on the level of individual ontologies formulated in the description logics DLLite and EL and show that in all cases where answering conjunctive queries (CQs) with (open and) closed predicates is tractable, it coincides with an...

Testing large-scale distributed systems is a challenge, because some errors manifest themselves only after a distributed sequence of events that involves machine and network failures. DS is a checker that allows developers to specify predicates on distributed properties of a deployed system, and that checks these predicates while the system is running. When DS finds a problem it produces the se...

This paper presents the extraction of Complex Predicates (CPs) in Oriya based on shallow morphology and available seed lists of verbs. Generally Oriya language is a free word order language. Free word order languages have relatively unrestricted local word group or phrase structures that make the problem of complex predicates extraction quite challenging. The complex predicates are generally th...