It is plausible to think that simulation is perhaps the most important reasoning tool that we have for user modeling. This is behind what we mean when we say that a superlative fisherman can "think like a fish." The fisherman decides where the fish must be by imagining where he would be in this river if he were a fish. Whether or not this idea is sound for fish and fisherman, 1 it certainly app...

This paper develops a very simple probabilistic dynamic formalism for a semantics of epistemic modal expressions that is essentially expressivist in nature, with a notion of information states based on probability spaces. It differs from existing approaches to this task (in particular [22] and [12]) in certain features that make it more appropriate for modelling actual conversational behavior, ...

The present contribution deals with the epistemic readings of the Italian modal verbs dovere ('must') and potere ('may'/'can'). The two verbs show striking differences — both quantitative and qualitative — with respect to the possibility of epistemic interpretation, differences which have gone so far completely unnoticed in the — rather scarce — semantic literature on modal verbs in Italian. Ev...

The article is devoted to the analysis of nomenclature means expressing epistemic modality in English language. At functional-semantic level, semantics assessment reflected values units morphological, lexical, and syntactic levels language, capable performing following semantic functions at level utterance: degree confidence speaker, validity judgment, subjectivity, unreality. Since combined co...

We present a logical setting that incorporates a belief-revision mechanism within Dynamic-Epistemic logic. As the “static” basis for belief revision, we use epistemic plausibility models, together with a modal language based on two epistemic operators: a “knowledge” modality K (the standard S5, fully introspective, notion), and a “safe belief” modality 2 (“weak”, non-negatively-introspective, n...

Abstract Modern Greek displays two variants of the word min ; one corresponds to a negative marker, and other an epistemic modal. We focus on latter provide, for first time our knowledge, experimental evidence its exact interpretation, showing that (i) non-negative is incompatible with overt realization polar propositional alternatives { p ,¬ }, (ii) it conveys medium speaker certainty respect ...

Epistemic modality involves complex contextual dependencies that linguists have studied (Roberts 1989; Veltman 1996). We show that they have a natural treatment within a continuation style semantics.