If the EKC holds, we might be tempted to make an even stronger statement: growthpromoting policies in less developed countries (LDCs) cause incomes to rise and are thus environmentally friendly. We do not need to bother negotiating with developing countries to reduce emissions. Let LDCs develop, and they will eventually solve their own environmental problems, even if in the short run pollution ...

We present a new approach to theory revision that uses a linguistically based semantics to help detect and correct errors in classification rules. The idea is that preferring linguistically cohesive revisions will enhance the comprehensibility and ultimately the accuracy of rules. We explain how to associate terms in the rules with elements in a lexical class hierarchy and use distance within t...

Developing more shareable resources to support natural language analysis will make it easier and cheaper to create new language processing applications and to support research in computational linguistics. One natural candidate for such a resource is a broad-coverage dictionary, since the work required to create such a dictionary is large but there is general agreement on at least some of the i...

In this paper we illustrate and underline the importance of making detailed linguistic information a central part of the process of automatic acquisition of large-scale lexicons as a means for enhancing robustness and at the same time ensuring maintainability and re-usability of deep lexicalised grammars. Using the error mining techniques proposed in (van Noord, 2004) we show very convincingly ...

This article presents tile Structural Correspondence Speclflcatlon Environment (S('SE) being Implemented at GETA-The SCSE is designed to help linguists to develop, consult and verify the SCS Gr'alt~nar s (SCSG) which specify I lngulst ic models. It Integrates the t eclln 1 clues of' data bases, structured edltors and language interpreters. We argue that formalisms and tools of specification are...

The enigma of the Emergence of Natural Languages, coupled or not with the closely related problem of their Evolution, E&ENL Problem for short, is perceived today as one of the most important scientific problems and even, according to the provocative title of [11], as the “hardest” one: “Despite a staggering growth in our scientific knowledge about the origin of life, the universe and (almost) e...

We consider the application of Game Theory in the modeling of different strategies of politeness. In particular, we examine how differences in the linguistic form of requests and proposals map onto the structure of the game being played by interlocutors. We show how considerations of social wants [1, 2] and coordination and cooperation motivate these differences. First, we adapt the notion of o...

The Multi-language Speech (MLS) Corpus supports NIST’s Language Recognition Evaluation series by providing new conversational telephone speech and broadcast narrowband data in 20 languages/dialects. The corpus was built with the intention of testing system performance in the matter of distinguishing closely related or confusable linguistic varieties, and careful manual auditing of collected dat...

This paper introduces L2F’s (INESC-ID) question/answering system and presents its results in the QA@CLEF07 evaluation task. QA@LF bases its performance on a high-quality deep linguistic analysis of the question, which is strongly based on named entity recognition. However, if a precise analysis is not possible or if no answer is found in previous processed data, the system is also capable of re...