I explore some of the issues that arise when trying to establish a connection between the underspecification hypothesis pursued in the NLP literature and work on ambiguity in semantics and in the psychological literature. A theory of underspecification is developed ‘from the first principles’, i.e., starting from a definition of what it means for a sentence to be semantically ambiguous and from...

Sediment delivery ratio (SDR) is traditionally defined as the fraction of upland gross erosion that is transported out of a defined area, e.g., a plot or catchment. It is, effectively, an index of sediment transport efficiency. Previously, it is treated as an empirically-lumped parameter used as a mechanism for compensating for sediment deposition within a catchment area. In this paper, we prop...

Supply chain pressures have caused some firms to reexamine their processes. In doing so, firms are exploring emerging technology such as RFID to enable seamless exchange of information within their supply chain. While RFID promised to “revolutionize” the way business processes are managed today, the impact and benefits of the technology are still unclear and ambiguous concepts such as “intellig...

Academic governance is an important dimension of institutional self-governance. This paper reports on the findings of a new study of university senates (academic councils) in Canadian universities in order to analyze changes in structure and in senate members’ perceptions of the structure and role of senates over the last decade. Following the basic design of a similar study in 2000, this study...

The influential public health ethics framework proposed by Childress et al. includes five "justificatory conditions," two of which are "necessity" and "least infringement." While the framework points to important moral values, we argue it is redundant for it to list both necessity and least infringement because they are logically equivalent. However, it is ambiguous whether Childress et al. wou...

T he growing interest in pulmonary hypertension (PH) in many medical specialties including cardiology, rheumatology and respiratory medicine, is possibly due to the recent availability of specific drugs approved for a group of rare conditions defined as pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH). The terms ‘‘pulmonary hypertension’’ and ‘‘pulmonary arterial hypertension’’ appear to be quite similar,...

The deployment of systems for human-to-machine communication by voice requires overcoming a variety of obstacles that affect the speech-processing technologies. Problems encountered in the field might include variation in speaking style, acoustic noise, ambiguity of language, or confusion on the part of the speaker. The diversity of these practical problems encountered in the "real world" leads...