I propose to consider the question, "Can machines think?" This should begin with definitions of the meaning of the terms "machine" and "think." The definitions might be framed so as to reflect so far as possible the normal use of the words, but this attitude is dangerous, If the meaning of the words "machine" and "think" are to be found by examining how they are commonly used it is difficult to...

OBJECTIVES The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between religious meaning and subjective well-being. A major emphasis is placed on assessing race differences in the relationship between these constructs. METHODS Interviews were conducted with a nationwide sample of older White and older Black adults. Survey items were administered to assess a sense of meaning in life that ...

The excellence of a translation should be measured by the extent to which it preserves the exact meaning of the original. But so long as we have no accepted definition of meaning, much less of exact meaning, it is difficult to use such a measure. As a practical alternative, therefore, we must search for more modest, yet better defined, procedures. The present article attempts to survey some of ...

Survey data are often used to map cultural diversity by aggregating scores of attitude and value items across countries. However, this procedure only makes sense if the same concept is measured in all countries. In this study we argue that when (co)variances among sets of items are similar across countries, these countries share a common way of assigning meaning to the items. Clusters of cultur...

In this paper, we discuss the use of the Meaning-Text Theory (MTT) of [Mel88] in a controlled language (CL) application. We show that MTT defines a linguistic framework which is ideally suited for the definition and automation of CL rules. In the paper, we first briefly present a CL system based on MTT. We then discuss MTT in more detail. We show how CL-specific information can be represented s...

We study the performance of Arabic text classification combining various techniques: (a) tfidf vs. dependency syntax, for feature selection and weighting; (b) class association rules vs. support vector machines, for classification. The Arabic text is used in two forms: rootified and lightly stemmed. The results we obtain show that lightly stemmed text leads to better performance than rootified ...

Recent research has shown clear improvement in translation quality by exploiting linguistic syntax for either the source or target language. However, when using syntax for both languages (“tree-to-tree” translation), there is evidence that syntactic divergence can hamper the extraction of useful rules (Ding and Palmer 2005). Smith and Eisner (2006) introduced quasi-synchronous grammar, a formal...