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

Quasi Conjunction, Quasi Disjunction, T-norms and T-conorms: Probabilistic Aspects

We make a probabilistic analysis related to some inference rules which play an important role in nonmonotonic reasoning. In a coherence-based setting, we study the extensions of a probability assessment defined on $n$ conditional events to their quasi conjunction, and by exploiting duality, to their quasi disjunction. The lower and upper bounds coincide with some well known t-norms and t-conorms: minimum, product, Lukasiewicz, and Hamacher t-norms and their dual t-conorms. On this basis we obtain Quasi And and Quasi Or rules. These are rules for which any finite family of conditional events p-entails the associated quasi conjunction and quasi disjunction. We examine some cases of logical dependencies, and we study the relations among coherence, inclusion for conditional events, and p-entailment. We also consider the Or rule, where quasi conjunction and quasi disjunction of premises coincide with the conclusion. We analyze further aspects of quasi conjunction and quasi disjunction, by computing probabilistic bounds on premises from bounds on conclusions. Finally, we consider biconditional events, and we introduce the notion of an $n$-conditional event. Then we give a probabilistic interpretation for a generalized Loop rule. In an appendix we provide explicit expressions for the Hamacher t-norm and t-conorm in the unitary hypercube

Reason Maintenance - State of the Art

This paper describes state of the art in reason maintenance with a focus on its future usage in the KiWi project. To give a bigger picture of the field, it also mentions closely related issues such as non-monotonic logic and paraconsistency. The paper is organized as follows: first, two motivating scenarios referring to semantic wikis are presented which are then used to introduce the different reason maintenance techniques