Vague predicates, those that exhibit borderline cases, pose a persistent problem for philosophers and logicians. Although they are ubiquitous in natural language, when used in a logical context, vague predicates lead to contradiction. This paper will address a question that is intimately related to this problem. Given their inherent imprecision, why do vague predicates arise in the first place?...

Natural language is one of the primary means of communicating spatial information, but existing geographic information retrieval (GIR) facilities are weak in this respect. One of the major challenges in automated interpetation of spatial natural language is how to model the regions implied by spatial expressions. This paper presents a field-based model for representing the vague regions defined...

A framework for rapid development of conversational natural language call routing systems is proposed. The framework cuts costs by using only scantily prepared business requirements to automatically create an initial prototype. Besides clear targets (terminal routing classes), vague targets which are variations of users’ incomplete (semantically overlapping) sentences are enumerated. The vague ...

The study of databases began with the design of efficient storage and data sharing techniques for large amount of data. This paper concerns the processing of imprecision and indiscernibility in relational databases using vague rough technique leading to vague rough relational database model. We utilize the notion of indiscernibility and possibility from rough set theory coupled with the idea of...

Many knowledge-based systems need to represent vague concepts such as \old" and \tall". The practical approach of representing vague concepts as precise intervals over numbers (e.g., \old" as the interval [70,110]) is well-accepted in Arti cial Intelligence. However, there have been no systematic procedures, only ad hoc methods, to delimit the boundaries of intervals representing the vague pred...

This paper addresses the question of how to model the application of vague predicates like tall and bald to plural subjects like John and Mary and the men. In other words, we are interested in developing a logical analysis for natural language sentences like Mary is tall and The men are bald. In the past 30 years, much research has been devoted to finding the proper logical framework to model t...

Inaccessibility of part of the database is a research topic hardly addressed in the literature about distributed databases. However, there are various application areas, where the database has to remain operable even if part of the database is inaccessible. In particular, queries to the database should be processed in an appropriate way. This means that the nal and all intermediate results of a...

stuttering as a disorder from which many people suffer has drawn the attention of many psychologists and theorists. however, very few studies have investigated the incidence of this phenomenon in second language learning. this study deals with the problem from only one perspective: how does stuttering in second language of a stammerer come to exist? the answer to this question seems to be vague...