Fr. O'Rourkc is director of the (.'enterfor Health Care Ethics, Saint Louis University. T he Ethical and Relijjious Directives for Catholic Health {'are Services (ERD) were approved by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB) in November 1994. The committee that prepared the text for consideration by the NCCB labored For more than five years. Given the many drafts, study sessions, and...

Empirical studies of text coherence often use tree-like structures in the spirit of Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) as representational device. This paper identifies several sources of ambiguity in RST-inspired trees and argues that such structures are therefore not as explanatory as a text representation should be. As an alternative, an approach toward multi-level annotation (MLA) of texts i...

This paper discusses how to remove a kind of ambiguity in a text understanding system based on simulation. The system simulates some events mentioned in text on a world model and observes the behavior of the model during the simulation. Through these processes, it can recognize the other events mentioned implicitly. However, in case the system infers plural number of possible world, it can't de...

Exploratory data analysis over foreign language text presents virtually untapped opportunity. This work incorporates Naïve Bayes classifier with Case-Based Reasoning in order to classify and analyze Arabic texts related to fanaticism. The Arabic vocabularies are converted to equivalent English words using conceptual hierarchy structure. The understanding process operates at two phases. At the f...

Traditional cognitive vulnerability-stress models regarding the etiology of depression emphasize the content of the depressed individual's thoughts. One important cognitive content index, explanatory style, represents the habitual way that individuals assign causes to events that occur in their lives. A more contemporary model, however, emphasizes the cognitive process by which these attributio...