This paper is concerned with the robust analysis of the discourse structure of a text via underspecification. Most current discourse theories (e.g. Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) by Mann and Thompson (1988), Abduction by Hobbs et al. (1993) or Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT) by Asher (1993)) require detailed world and context knowledge for the derivation of the discourse str...

In all languages, sentences convey information that allows people to locate situations in time. Languages vary: some have tense and tense-like forms, others do not. I will suggest general pragmatic principles to account for how temporal location works in language. The principles have different realizations according to the forms that are syntactically obligatory in a given language. I will begi...

Being able to declaratively specify control within a planning (or theorem-proving) paradigm is necessary if we are to build intelligent machines. This paper introduces an implementation of planning using situation calculus, in the answer set programming paradigm. Our forward-chaining planner has control mechanisms which are based on three ideas: (1) controlling the domain of discourse, (2) ment...

This paper deals with the phenomenon known as dequeísmo in Spanish, in particular with the semantic differences between canonical sentences with que and dequeísta sentences. I analyze previous corpus studies of dequeísmo, test their predictions with an independent corpus of spoken Colombian Spanish, and finally carry out a logistic regression to test new possible parameters that might influence...

Although previous research has shown that listeners can use prosody to resolve syntactic ambiguities in spoken sentences, it is not clear whether naive, untrained speakers in experimental situations ordinarily produce the prosodic cues necessary for disambiguating such sentences. In a series of experiments, the authors found that neither professional nor untrained speakers consistently produced...

the islamic revolution helped develop a new discourse and semantic system. one of the methods to study or analyze the political phenomena is critical discourse analysis namely, that of laclau and mouffe›s discourse, the most pertinent. this article examines its main question whether the values of the islamic revolution concepts and identity are constructed, spread and articulated according to l...

In this paper we present RTMML, a markup language for the tenses of verbs and temporal relations between verbs. There is a richness to tense in language that is not fully captured by existing temporal annotation schemata. Following Reichenbach we present an analysis of tense in terms of abstract time points, with the aim of supporting automated processing of tense and temporal relations in lang...

In important situations, individual decision-making is systematically biased. When deciding (rather than consuming), extrinsic attributes of choice options are more salient than intrinsic attributes. People overestimate extrinsic attributes and therefore put too much effort into acquiring income and gaining status, lowering their utility level. These mistakes are accentuated in authoritarian sy...

We provide a systematic model of spatial reference frames. The model captures concepts underlying natural language expressions in English that represent both external and internal as well as static and dynamic relationships between entities. Our implementation in the functional language Haskell generates valid English sentences from situations and reference frames. Spatial reference frames are ...