Communitarianism is the thesis that it is ultimately the dispositions of a community of speakers that determine the content of a symbol. Boghossian‟s reasons for rejecting this theory turn on the fact that he sees the account as unable to accommodate the normativity of meaning, i.e. the fact that the content of a symbol must exclude parts of the world (application of the symbol to which would t...

One of the many roles of linguistics is to address the semantics of natural languages, that is, the meaning of sentences in natural languages. An important part of the meaning of sentences can be characterized by stating the conditions that need to hold for the sentence to be true. Necessarily, this approach, called truth-conditional semantics, disregards some relevant aspects of meaning, but h...

The paper discusses four types of knowledge concepts, especially three kinds of uncertain knowledge, based on relationships among data, information and meaning. The goal is to fuse research results on knowledge engineering and epistemology. We analyze four kinds of basic connection forms (i.e. meaning) between information and dada by using formal context, and obtain their physical signification...

This paper describes the initial results of an experiment in integrating knowledge-based text processing with real-world reasoning in a question answering system. Our MOQA “meaning-oriented question answering” system seeks answers to questions not in open text but rather in a structured fact repository whose elements are instances of ontological concepts extracted from the text meaning represen...

The lexicon has long been assumed to be the source of all conceptual content expressed by sentences. Syntactic structures have correspondingly been seen only as providing instructions for the assembly of the concepts expressed by words. Under this view, sentences have meaning, but the syntactic structures which sentences instantiate do not. This paper challenges this view: it uses the phenomeno...

In this article, I will outline, how three meaning theoretic paradigms deal with the content of belief, and what difficulties each of them faces: the Fregean approach, the Neo-Russellian or direct reference approach, and the dualist approach as a mixture of both. The Fregean approach stipulates senses that correspond to linguistic expressions and fulfill various roles such as determining the tr...

Summarisation is poised to become a generally accepted solution to the larger problem of content analysis. We offer an alternative perspective on this problem, by tackling the complementary task of content characterisation; our motivation for doing so is to avoid some of the fundamental shortcomings of summarisation technologies today. Traditionally, the document summarisation task has been tac...

In Construction Morphology (CM), a compound is treated as a construction at the word level with a systematic correlation between its form and meaning, in the sense that any change in the form is accompanied by a change in the meaning. Compound words are coined by compounding templates which are called abstract schemas in CM. These abstract constructional schemas generalize over sets of existing...