The role of intuition in software development was discussed in a most original fashion by Peter Naur in 1984. Yet there has been little subsequent interest in elaborating on Naur’s ideas. In seeking to explain this neglect, we argue that the accepted views of software development, both within the formal and pragmatic traditions, are deeply influenced by a conceptual framework inherited from com...

I shall describe the beautiful fit of the ideas of Alfred North Whitehead and William James with the concepts of relativistic quantum field theory developed by Tomonaga and Schwinger. The central concept is a set of happenings each of which is assigned a space-time region. This growing set of non-overlapping regions fill out a growing space-time region that advances into the stilluncreated and ...

Owing to the growing interest in communicative, cultural and pragmatic aspects of second language learning in recent years, the present study tried to investigate representations of pragmatic aspects of English as a foreign language in Iranian high school textbooks. Using Halliday’s (1978), and Searle’s (1976) models, different language functions and speech acts were specifically determined and...

interlanguage pragmatics (ilp) has witnessed a growing body of research in the past two decades. one of the under-explored domains of l2 pragmatics is the role of learning strategies specifically tailored for the development of ilp knowledge. therefore, this investigation aimed to determine the significant interlanguage pragmatic learning strategies (ipls) used by high vs. low l2 pragmatic achi...

In this paper, we translate sentence generation from TAG grammars with semantic and pragmatic information into a planning problem by encoding the contribution of each word declaratively and explicitly. This allows us to tap into the recent performance improvements in off-the-shelf planners. It also opens up new perspectives on referring expression generation and the relationship between languag...

One of the hallmarks of human natural language (NL) interaction is the ability for people to balance a variety of social and communicative goals when choosing how to realize their speech actions. These goals can include pragmatic criteria such as correctness, informativeness, and brevity (i.e., Gricean conversational maxims) or social factors such as politeness. However, there currently does no...

The present investigation sought to comparatively explore the effect of length of residence (LOR) as well as EFL instruction on the pragmatic competence of Iranian learners. The participants were 45 EFL learners in Iran and 45 learners in Canada selected based on snowball sampling and each group was divided into three sub-groups based on the years of learning English in an EFL or a natural sett...

This paper presents some initial experiment with transformation-based and memory-based learning for detecting errors on the word level in speech recognition results. Features that were tested include word confidence scores along with lexical, contextual and pragmatic information. The results show that the best classifier performs 11.9% better than baseline for all words, and 17.9% for content w...