Three of the great sources of meaning in life are the good, the true, and the beautiful, and I aim to make headway on the grand Enlightenment project of ascertaining what, if anything, they have in common. Concretely, if we take a (stereotypical) Mother Teresa, Mandela, Darwin, Einstein, Dostoyevsky, and Picasso, what might they share that makes it apt to deem their lives to have truly mattered...

Information and meaning exist around us and within ourselves, and the same information can correspond to different meanings. This is true for humans and animals, and is becoming true for robots. We propose here an overview of this subject by using a systemic tool related to meaning generation that has already been published (C. Menant, Entropy 2003). The Meaning Generator System (MGS) is a syst...

There is a certain consensus on some defining features of collocations (they are frequent, recurrent, conventional, institutionalized, etc.), but there is not much agreement on other characteristics, for example whether or not they constitute binary lexical relations, and, crucially, whether they are arbitrary, and must be stipulated, or should instead be deduced or inferred. I will argue that ...

This article presents the results we obtained on a complex annotation task (that of dependency syntax) using a specifically designed Game with a Purpose, ZombiLingo.1 We show that with suitable mechanisms (decomposition of the task, training of the players and regular control of the annotation quality during the game), it is possible to obtain annotations whose quality is significantly higher t...

The current PASSAGE syntactic representation is the result of 9 years of constant evolution with the aim of providing a common ground for evaluating parsers of French whatever their type and supporting theory. In this paper we present the latest developments concerning the formalism and show first through a review of basic linguistic phenomena that it is a plausible minimal common ground for re...

Now, we will begin the proving of some theorems, a skill which you will need in the upper division courses for which Math 111 is a prerequisite. For clarity, we will define theorem, proof, and definition. A theorem is a mathematical statement that is true and can be (and has been) verified as true. A proof of a theorem is a written verification that shows that the theorem is true. A definition ...

We are interested in the following features of this discourse. First, we want to capture the meaning of the entailment particle therefore, which relates the content of the premise (1a) and the content of the conclusion (1b) and requires the latter to be entailed by the former. I take the content of a sentence to be truth-conditional in nature, i.e., to be the set of possible worlds in which the...

We introduce a multi-agent logic of knowledge with time where Fφ stands for “there is an informative event after which φ.” Formula Fφ is true in a model iff it is true in all its refinements (i.e., atoms and back are satisfied; the dual of simulation). The logic is almost normal, and positive knowledge is preserved. The meaning of Fφ is also “after the agents become aware of new factual informa...

Two currently active strands of research on logics for multi-agent systems are dynamic epistemic logic, focusing on the epistemic consequences of actions, and logics of coalitional ability, focusing on what coalitions of agents can achieve by cooperating strategically. In this paper we make a first attempt to bridge these topics by considering the question: “what can a coalition achieve by publ...