Cognitive Semantics: An Extension of the Cartesian Legacy

The basic intention of this article is to show how the cognitive semantics inherits its ancestry from the Cartesian foundation. The emergence of the cognitive semantics is envisaged here as an integral part of the knowledge evolution, in terms of shifts, which ultimately determines the future direction of our epistemological quest. Basically two questions have been emphasized here: (a) how (and what amount of) common sense metaphysics can be incorporated within the existing system of knowledge; and (b) is there any substratum where the mind-body dualism can be boiled down

"Minimal defence": a refinement of the preferred semantics for argumentation frameworks

Dung's abstract framework for argumentation enables a study of the interactions between arguments based solely on an ``attack'' binary relation on the set of arguments. Various ways to solve conflicts between contradictory pieces of information have been proposed in the context of argumentation, nonmonotonic reasoning or logic programming, and can be captured by appropriate semantics within Dung's framework. A common feature of these semantics is that one can always maximize in some sense the set of acceptable arguments. We propose in this paper to extend Dung's framework in order to allow for the representation of what we call ``restricted'' arguments: these arguments should only be used if absolutely necessary, that is, in order to support other arguments that would otherwise be defeated. We modify Dung's preferred semantics accordingly: a set of arguments becomes acceptable only if it contains a minimum of restricted arguments, for a maximum of unrestricted arguments.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figure

TDLR: Top (\u3cem\u3eSemantic\u3c/em\u3e)-Down (\u3cem\u3eSyntactic\u3c/em\u3e) Language Representation

Language understanding involves processing text with both the grammatical and common-sense contexts of the text fragments. The text “I went to the grocery store and brought home a car” requires both the grammatical context (syntactic) and common-sense context (semantic) to capture the oddity in the sentence. Contextualized text representations learned by Language Models (LMs) are expected to capture a variety of syntactic and semantic contexts from large amounts of training data corpora. Recent work such as ERNIE has shown that infusing the knowledge contexts, where they are available in LMs, results in significant performance gains on General Language Understanding (GLUE) benchmark tasks. However, to our knowledge, no knowledge-aware model has attempted to infuse knowledge through top-down semantics-driven syntactic processing (Eg: Common-sense to Grammatical) and directly operated on the attention mechanism that LMs leverage to learn the data context. We propose a learning framework Top-Down Language Representation (TDLR) to infuse common-sense semantics into LMs. In our implementation, we build on BERT for its rich syntactic knowledge and use the knowledge graphs ConceptNet and WordNet to infuse semantic knowledge

Ontology and Formal Semantics - Integration Overdue

In this note we suggest that difficulties encountered in natural language semantics are, for the most part, due to the use of mere symbol manipulation systems that are devoid of any content. In such systems, where there is hardly any link with our common-sense view of the world, and it is quite difficult to envision how one can formally account for the considerable amount of content that is often implicit, but almost never explicitly stated in our everyday discourse. \ud The solution, in our opinion, is a compositional semantics grounded in an ontology that reflects our commonsense view of the world and the way we talk about it in ordinary language. In the compositional logic we envision there are ontological (or first-intension) concepts, and logical (or second-intension) concepts, and where the ontological concepts include not only Davidsonian events, but other abstract objects as well (e.g., states, processes, properties, activities, attributes, etc.) \ud It will be demonstrated here that in such a framework, a number of challenges in the semantics of natural language (e.g., metonymy, intensionality, metaphor, etc.) can be properly and uniformly addressed.\u

Environment and health in children day care centers

This project addresses a set of common clinical problems in the context of children attending day care centres. It is common sense that children get sick more often as soon as they start attending a day care centre on a daily basis and this is particularly true for some groups at risk, as wheezing infants and wheezing pre-school childreninfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

A Compositional Approach to Structuring and Refinement of Typed Graph Grammars

Abstract Based on a categorical semantics that has been developed for typed graph grammars we uses colimits (pushouts) to model composition and (reverse) graph grammar morphisms to describe refinements of typed graph grammars. Composition of graph grammars w.r.t. common subgrammars is shown to be compatible with the semantics, i.e. the semantics of the composed grammar is obtained as the composition of the semantics of the component grammars. Moreover, the structure of a composed grammar is preserved during a refinement step in the sense that compatible refinements of the components induce a refinement of the composition. The concepts and results are illustrated by an example

Associating Semantics to Multilingual Tags in Folksonomies

Tagging systems are nowadays a common feature in web sites where user-generated content plays an important role. However, the lack of semantics and multilinguality hamper information retrieval process based on folksonomies. In this paper we propose an approach to bring semantics to multilingual folksonomies. This approach includes a sense disambiguation activity and takes advantage from knowledge generated by the masses in the form of articles, redirection and disambiguation links, and translations in Wikipedia. We use DBpedia as semantic resource to define the tag meanings

Everettian quantum mechanics without branching time

In this paper I assess the prospects for combining contemporary Everettian quantum mechanics (EQM) with branching-time semantics in the tradition of Kripke, Prior, Thomason and Belnap. I begin by outlining the salient features of ‘decoherence-based’ EQM, and of the ’consistent histories’ formalism that is particularly apt for conceptual discussions in EQM. This formalism permits of both ‘branching worlds’and ‘parallel worlds’ interpretations; the metaphysics of EQM is in this sense underdetermined by the physics. A prominent argument due to David Lewis [1986] supports the non-branching interpretation. Belnap et al. [2001] refer to Lewis’ argument as the ’Assertion problem’, and propose a pragmatic response to it. I argue that their response is unattractively ad hoc and complex, and that it prevents an Everettian who adopts branching-time semantics from making clear sense of objective probability. The upshot is that Everettians are better off without branching-time semantics. I conclude by discussing and rejecting an alternative possible motivation for branching time