O'Brien, Shank, Myers, and Rayner (1988) reported that readers generated elaborative inferences only when a text contained characteristics that virtually eliminated the possibility of an inference being disconfirmed. We reanalyzed the data of O'Brien et al. (1988) and also conducted an experiment in which we varied (a) whether or not there was an anaphoric relation between a target word and its...

We are developing a system that aims to perform the same inferences as a human reader, on car-crash reports. More precisely, we expect it to determine the causes of the accident as they appear from the text. We describe the general semantic framework in which our study takes place, the linguistic and semantic levels of analysis, and the inference rules used by the system. Mots-clés : sémantique...

This paper argues that local textual inferences come in three well-defined varieties (entailments, conventional implicatures/presuppositions, and conversational implicatures) and one less clearly defined one, generally available world knowledge. Based on this taxonomy, it discusses some of the examples in the PASCAL text suite and shows that these examples do not fall into any of them. It propo...

While there is a strong intuition that word alignments (e.g. synonymy, hyperonymy) play a relevant role in recognizing textto-text semantic inferences (e.g. textual entailment, semantic similarity), this intuition is often not reflected in the system performances and there is a general need of a deeper comprehension of the role of lexical resources. This paper provides an empirical analysis of ...

Research has extensively studied how children epistemically evaluate people as secondhand information sources, but less is known about they knowledge artifacts, (nonhuman sources; e.g., books). Recent studies indicate that many young prefer to learn from text presented by puppet informants, little why display this preference. Across three studies, we examine factors may influence the likelihood...

We investigated the effects of readers' goals on inference generation and memory for expository text. College students (N = 82) read texts for the purpose of either study or entertainment. On-line inference generation was recorded via think-aloud procedures, and off-line memory was assessed via free recall. Reading goal strongly influenced inferential activity: Readers with a study goal produce...

To understand narrative, humans draw inferences about the underlying relations between narrative events. Cognitive theories of narrative understanding define these inferences as four different types of causality, that include pairs of events A, B where A physically causes B (X drop, X break), to pairs of events where A causes emotional state B (Y saw X, Y felt fear). Previous work on learning n...

This paper identifies the problem of analyses of message content as one of making specific inferences from recorded text to characteristics of a source that are not directly observable. The problem is common to a variety of analytical situations in the humanities and in the social sciences; and the way adequate solutions are found therefore deserves systematic attention. Choices among investiga...

the question of being as the reference of hermeneutics is more radical than the question of interpretation in hermeneutics. being in hermeneutics becomes displayed within a text, without which no interpretation would be possible. as i have discussed in my book the authenticity of the text in hermeneutics , the text as the reference and the source of legitimacy in hermeneutics deserves priority ...

Today there are still many applications in the Internet, where the user is given a textual description of a spatial configuration (e.g. chat, e-mail or newsgroups). The user is asked to imagine the scene and to draw inferences. We present a new approach to generate depictions of such scenes. Besides of drawing spatial inferences, this leads to the problem of solving a system of complicated nume...