− The paper presents a type A (experimental) evaluation of the uncertainty due to systematic effects. After a brief discussion about the general problem of choosing a proper mathematical representation for systematic effects in the context of uncertainty evaluation, a pragmatic approach, based on the familiar random variable theory and the ISO 5725 norm is proposed. The approach is called “inte...

Familia is an open-source toolkit for pragmatic topic modeling in industry. Familia abstracts the utilities of topic modeling in industry as two paradigms: semantic representation and semantic matching. Efficient implementations of the two paradigms are made publicly available for the first time. Furthermore, we provide off-the-shelf topic models trained on large-scale industrial corpora, inclu...

In this paper, a representation formalism based on actions and hierarchical plans is proposed to model the aspectual and temporal composition of sentences. Action verbs are interpreted as (possibly un-derspeciied) instances of action schemata that include a plan body; the interpretation process is carried out in an incremental way: the other linguistic elements, like tense and adverbs, are eval...

We present an operable definition of focus which is argued to be of a cognito-pragmatic nature and explore how it is determined in discourse in a formalized manner. For this purpose, a file card model of discourse model and knowledge store is introduced enabling the decomposition and formal representation of its determination process as a programmable algorithm (FDA). Interdisciplinary evidence...

In all languages, sentences convey information that allows people to locate situations in time. Languages vary: some have tense and tense-like forms, others do not. I will suggest general pragmatic principles to account for how temporal location works in language. The principles have different realizations according to the forms that are syntactically obligatory in a given language. I will begi...

Leadership positions in global health are greatly skewed toward men; the imbalance is more pronounced in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). The under-representation of women in leadership is a threat to gender equality, and also impacts the improvement of women's health outcomes globally. In this perspectives piece, we assert that the promotion and retention of women in global health lea...

Inter-ethnic botanical borrowing is usually deemed to be based on pragmatic efficiency. However, in the regional system we discovered between several indigenous groups from the Peruvian rainforest, the transfer of ethnomedicinal knowledge relies much more on relational factors than on any kind of strictly therapeutic efficacy. This is clearly substantiated by a detailed comparison between objec...

In this paper the methodology followed to build a question-answering system for the Portuguese language is described. The system has two modules: preliminary analysis of documents (information extraction) and query processing (information retrieval). The proposed approach is based on computational linguistic theories: syntactical analysis (constraint grammars); followed by semantic analysis usi...

As any language, Sign Language (SL) has a vocabulary and a grammar [1][2]. In addition, the SL has the specificity to be practiced in the space. The work presented in this article offers a pragmatic approach to a classification system for signs of French Sign Language (FSL) to facilitate the access to the vocabulary of this language with the least amount of search items. The objective is to set...

This paper proposes an evaluation of the adequacy of the constraint logic programming paradigm for natural language processing. Theoretical aspects of this question have been discussed in several works (see for example [Smolka89] or [Aı̈t-Kaci92]). We adopt here a pragmatic point of view and our argumentation relies on concrete solutions. Using actual contraints (in the CLP sense) is neither eas...