Much work on vagueness has focused on adjectives such as thin, bald and red as the paradigm case of the phenomenon. But vagueness is prevalent also in many other domains of natural language, and it is one of these other domains—namely expressions of quantity—that is the focus of the present paper. Quantificational expressions present a diverse range of examples of vagueness, imprecision and und...

November 2005 Vol.6 No.2 IEEE Intelligent Informatics Bulletin Abstract--Similarity measure is one of important, effective and widely-used methods in data processing and analysis. As vague set theory has become a promising representation of fuzzy concepts, in this paper we present a similarity measure approach for better understanding the relationship between two vague sets in applications. Com...

In this paper, we present two new methods for evaluating students’ answerscripts using vague values, where the evaluating marks awarded to the questions in the students’ answerscripts are represented by vague values. The vague mark awarded to each question of a student’s answerscript can be regarded as a vague set, where each element in the universe of discourse belonging to the vague set is re...

This paper deals with the generation of definite (i.e., uniquely referring) descriptions containing semantically vague expressions ('large', 'small', etc.). Firstly, the paper proposes a semantic analysis of vague descriptions that does justice to the contextdependent meaning of the vague expressions in them. Secondly, the paper shows how this semantic analysis can be implemented using a modifi...

This research presents a methodology for the ontological formalisation of vague spatial concepts from natural language, with an application to the automatic recognition of event occurrences on video data. The main issue faced when defining concepts sourced from language is vagueness, related to the presence of ambiguities and borderline cases even in simple concepts such as ‘near’, ‘fast’, ‘big...

In this paper we investigate variation in the translation of three vague quantifiers, many, some and a few between English and Chinese. Studies of ‘linguistic vagueness’ (sometimes called ‘language vagueness’ in previous research) regard vagueness as a general phenomenon in language. In this type of study, vagueness is often discussed – but not limited – to indeterminacy of the referential boun...

ESL students who write in English may present written material in a rhetorical and organizational mode that reflects the pattern which is valued in their native culture and rhetoric. Considering the violation of English code of writing in the writings of Iranian students, we will notice one common characteristic: They are reluctant (or ignorant of) to write a unified paragraph. Their writing co...