21,303 research outputs found
Naming the largest number: Exploring the boundary between mathematics and the philosophy of mathematics
What is the largest number accessible to the human imagination? The question
is neither entirely mathematical nor entirely philosophical. Mathematical
formulations of the problem fall into two classes: those that fail to fully
capture the spirit of the problem, and those that turn it back into a
philosophical problem
The REVERE project:Experiments with the application of probabilistic NLP to systems engineering
Despite natural language’s well-documented shortcomings as a medium for precise technical description, its use in software-intensive systems engineering remains inescapable. This poses many problems for engineers who must derive problem understanding and synthesise precise solution descriptions from free text. This is true both for the largely unstructured textual descriptions from which system requirements are derived, and for more formal documents, such as standards, which impose requirements on system development processes. This paper describes experiments that we have carried out in the REVERE1 project to investigate the use of probabilistic natural language processing techniques to provide systems engineering support
The importance of the observer in science
The concept of {\em complexity} (as a quantity) has been plagued by numerous
contradictory and confusing definitions. By explicitly recognising a role for
the observer of a system, an observer that attaches meaning to data about the
system, these contradictions can be resolved, and the numerous complexity
measures that have been proposed can be seen as cases where different observers
are relevant, and/or being proxy measures that loosely scale with complexity,
but are easy to compute from the available data. Much of the epistemic
confusion in the subject can be squarely placed at science's tradition of
removing the observer from the description in order to guarantee {\em
objectivity}. Explicitly acknowledging the role of the observer helps untangle
other confused subject areas. {\em Emergence} is a topic about which much ink
has been spilt, but it can be understand easily as an irreducibility between
description space and meaning space. Quantum Mechanics can also be understood
as a theory of observation. The success in explaining quantum mechanics, leads
one to conjecture that all of physics may be reducible to properties of the
observer. And indeed, what are the necessary (as opposed to contingent)
properties of an observer? This requires a full theory of consciousness, from
which we are a long way from obtaining. However where progress does appear to
have been made, e.g. Daniel Dennett's {\em Consciousness Explained}, a
recurring theme of self-observation is a crucial ingredient.Comment: In Proceedings The Two Cultures: Reconsidering the division between
the Sciences and Humanities, UNSW, July 200
Recommended from our members
Generation of multi-modal dialogue for a net environment
In this paper an architecture and special purpose markup language for simulated affective face-to-face communication is presented. In systems based on this architecture, users will be able to watch embodied conversational agents interact with each other in virtual locations on the internet. The markup language, or Rich Representation Language (RRL), has been designed to provide an integrated representation of speech, gesture, posture and facial animation
Type-driven semantic interpretation and feature dependencies in R-LFG
Once one has enriched LFG's formal machinery with the linear logic mechanisms
needed for semantic interpretation as proposed by Dalrymple et. al., it is
natural to ask whether these make any existing components of LFG redundant. As
Dalrymple and her colleagues note, LFG's f-structure completeness and coherence
constraints fall out as a by-product of the linear logic machinery they propose
for semantic interpretation, thus making those f-structure mechanisms
redundant. Given that linear logic machinery or something like it is
independently needed for semantic interpretation, it seems reasonable to
explore the extent to which it is capable of handling feature structure
constraints as well.
R-LFG represents the extreme position that all linguistically required
feature structure dependencies can be captured by the resource-accounting
machinery of a linear or similiar logic independently needed for semantic
interpretation, making LFG's unification machinery redundant. The goal is to
show that LFG linguistic analyses can be expressed as clearly and perspicuously
using the smaller set of mechanisms of R-LFG as they can using the much larger
set of unification-based mechanisms in LFG: if this is the case then we will
have shown that positing these extra f-structure mechanisms is not
linguistically warranted.Comment: 30 pages, to appear in the the ``Glue Language'' volume edited by
Dalrymple, uses tree-dvips, ipa, epic, eepic, fullnam
- …