To navigate many-to-many mappings between referents and linguistic expressions, listeners need to calibrate likelihood estimates for different referential expressions taking into account both the context and speaker-specific variation. Focusing on speaker variation, we present three experiments. Experiment 1 establishes that listeners generalize speakerspecific patterns of pre-nominal modificat...

Different auction-based approaches have been used to allocate resources in Grids, but none of them provide the design choice for a specific economic model while considering the interest of all participants in the market. In this paper, we implement an auction-based framework for producer and consumer matchmaking in an ad-hoc Grid. In ad-hoc Grids, where the availability of resources and tasks i...

The ambiguity of natural language can be an important source of creative concepts. In compositional languages, a many-to-many network of associations exists linking concepts by the polysemy and synonymy of utterances. This network allows utterances to represent the combination of concepts, forming new and potentially interesting compound meanings. At the same time, new experiences of external a...

if we discover an adequate naturalistic explanation for religious experience, will it diminish its evidentiary value? in response to this question, many thinkers such as c.d. broad, richard swinburne and william wainwright argue that an adequate naturalistic explanation cannot diminish religious experience evidentiary value unless it can be demonstrated that there is no god. in contrary to this...

One of the bottlenecks of current recognition (and graph matching) systems is their assumption of one-to-one feature (node) correspondence. This assumption breaks down in the generic object recognition task where, for example, a collection of features at one scale (in one image) may correspond to a single feature at a coarser scale (in the second image). Generic object recognition therefore req...

Semantic matching is a fundamental step in implementing data sharing applications. Most systems automating this task however limit themselves to finding simple (one-to-one) matching. In fact, complex (many-to-many) matching raises a far more difficult problem as the search space of concept combinations is often very large. This article presents Indigo, a system discovering complex matching in t...

In this paper, we address the problem of planning the textual organization of instructions. We take the view that natural language generation (NLG) is a mapping process of diierent levels of conceptual and textual representations. Within this framework , we consider the mapping between the text's semantic representation and its rhetorical structure. We argue that such a mapping is not direct, b...

This work presents a grapheme-based approach of English-to-Chinese (E2C) transliteration, which consists of many-to-many (M2M) alignment and conditional random fields (CRF) using accessor variety (AV) as an additional feature to approximate local context of source graphemes. Experiment results show that the AV of a given English named entity generally improves effectiveness of E2C transliteration.