Intersentential elliptical utterances occur frequently during information-seeking dialogs in task domains. This paper presents a pragmatics-based framework for interpreting such utterances. Discourse expectations and focusing heuristics are used to facilitate recognition of an information-seeker's intent in uttering an elliptical fragment. The ellipsis is comprehended by identifying both the as...

Prior research suggests that infelicitous choice of questions can significantly underestimate children's actual abilities, independently of suggestiveness. One possibly difficult question type is indirect speech acts such as "Do you know..." questions (DYK, e.g., "Do you know where it happened?"). These questions directly ask if respondents know, while indirectly asking what respondents know. I...

It is widely recognized that distributed systems would greatly benefit from the availability of a generic failure detection service. There are however several issues that must be addressed before such a service can actually be implemented. In this paper, we highlight the main issues related to ensuring failure detection in large-scale systems, and overview the main solutions proposed in the lit...

Local failure of one structural element may result in the failure of another structural element. Failure might thus progress throughout a major part or even all of the structure. After reviewing a couple of failure events, it is outlined why current probabilitybased design codes are inadequate to prevent progressive collapse. It is discussed how these shortcomings might be overcome both within ...

Several attack models exist today that attempt to describe cyber-attacks to varying degrees of granularity. Fast and effective decision-making during cyber-attacks is often vital, especially during incidents in which reputation, finance and physical damage can have a crippling effect on people and organisations. Such attacks can render an organisation paralysed, and it may cease to function, we...

Research on L2 learners’ success at development and appropriate use of pragmatic ability and knowledge has mostly approached the issue from a cognitive or social perspective, and less attention has been devoted to the problem from the equally important emotional or individual-psychological lenses. This study sought to explore, first, the interplay between Iranian advanced EFL learners’ pragmati...

The Pragmatic Web is seen as a direction for realizing the vision of the Semantic Web. Realizing the vision of the Pragmatic Web, however, requires a shift in thinking about technology as a means for designing communication (which is making forms of interactivity possible that may otherwise be difficult or impossible). Some lessons from theory and research on Pragmatics provide grounds for unde...