With an exponential growth in archival of time-stamped documents such as newswire articles, blog posts and other web-pages, information retrieval (IR) has become a challenging task. The degree of complexity in this IR task increases when these archives cover long time-spans and the terminology in them has undergone significant changes. When users pose queries pertaining to historical informatio...

Can we say that s knows whether A or B when s is only able to rule out A, but remains uncertain about B? We discuss a set of examples put forward by J. Schaffer’s in favour of a contextualist answer to this problem. We present a context-sensitive and dynamic semantics for knowledge attributions, in which those can depend on the alternatives raised by the embedded question, but also on alternati...

Semantic matching (SM) for textual information can be informally defined as the task of effectively modeling text matching using representations more complex than those based on simple and independent set of surface forms of words or stems (typically indicated as bag-of-words). In this perspective, matching named entities (NEs) implies that the associated model can both overcomes mismatch betwe...

President Obama has pledged to review all cases prosecuted through the Guantánamo Military Commissions established under President George N. Bush. Such commissions, however, may have limited independent psychiatric evaluations for Guantánamo defendants. This article explores the legal foundations for evaluating Guantánamo detainees, analyzes the decisions of commissions through discussions with...

(AP)—More than 100 Am eri­ cans and several hundred other foreigners left Baghdad on je t­ liners for hom e Saturday, but many others rem ained behind, p rom pting P residen t Bush to criticize Iraq for freeing the hostages too slowly. In an o th e r m ajor develop­ ment, Bush announced on Sat­ urday th a t he and P resident Mikhail Gorbachev will m eet in Helsinki, Finland, on Sept. 9 to discu...

The opening paragraph of The Heart of Power by David Blumenthal and James Morone describes a conversation that Blumenthal, then an undergraduate at Harvard College, had with Richard Neustadt, the noted presidential historian and one time member of John F. Kennedy’s White House staff. Blumenthal credits Neustadt, his course on the American presidency, and their subsequent long friendship with th...