This paper describes the INEX 2003 participation of the Language & Inference Technology group of the University of Amsterdam. We participated in all three of the tasks, content-only, strict contentand-structure and vague content-and-structure.

Vague predicates such as heap, tall, bald, near to, nicer than, etc. are characterized by their Sorites susceptibility and the existence of borderline cases. In attempting to develop a general theory, diverse vague predicates are often analyzed in rather broad natural language settings. Because this has proven to be rather difficult, the phenomenon of vagueness is studied here in a narrower and...

Why is ordinary language vague? We argue that in contexts which a cooperative speaker not perfectly informed about the world, use of vague expressions can offer an optimal tradeoff between truthfulness (Gricean Quality) and informativeness Quantity). Focusing on approximation such as “around”, are semantically vague, we show they allow to convey indirect probabilistic information, way give list...

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Geography Markup Language (GML) explicitly represents geographical spatial knowledge in text mode. All kinds of fuzzy problems will inevitably be encountered in spatial knowledge expression. Especially for those expressions in text mode, this fuzziness will be broader. Describing and representing fuzziness in GML seems necessary. Three kinds of fuzziness in ...

This paper brings together several approaches to vagueness, and ends by suggesting a new approach. The common thread in these approaches is the crucial role played by context. In Section 2, we treat game-theoretic rationales for vagueness, and for the related concepts of ambiguity and generality. Common about these rationales is that they are based on the assumption of a conflict of interest be...