Inferentialism, Title VII, and Legal Concepts

We are all textualists now, or so it has been claimed. But textualism, the practice of interpreting statutes solely by reference to their words, is often associated with conservative judicial outcomes. This is especially true when a focus on statutory text is combined with the belief that the meanings of words are fixed. This combination creates a sort of textualist originalism, in which judges interpret statutes in accordance with what the words of a statute meant to the relevant linguistic community at the time of a statute’s enactment. In reaction to this conservative interpretive method, rejecting textualism but keeping an originalist commitment to fixed meanings provides one possible progressive response. Rather than focusing primarily on the statute’s language, one might instead look to the statute’s animating logic, purpose, or potential to create certain moral or economic outcomes. But rejecting a focus on statutory text is not the only progressive response to the originalist textualist. A second approach accepts that the meanings of statutes derive from text but denies that statutory text has a meaning that is fixed and unchanging. Often, advocates of this latter approach run into difficulty specifying how and when the meanings of words used in statutes change. And some might worry that any such account will leave judges too much room to determine that the meanings of a statute’s words have changed, thus enabling judges to express their policy preferences through the act of statutory interpretation. This Comment addresses the second approach. It engages with a particular account in philosophy of language that views meanings as resulting from inferential connections among concepts. Inferentialism suggests that we can think of these inferential connections as constitutive of meaning and thus think of meaning as in a real sense responsive to the on-the-ground effects of using a particular word. As those effects change, as new inferential connections are recognized, so too change the meanings of words. This Comment argues that this repeated process of changed inferential significance provides us with an account of dynamic meaning that judges can take notice of but not impose themselves upon. It thus provides a methodology through which judges can read statutory text to mean something new or different without thereby merely expressing a political preferenc

Finite state representation of reduplication processes in Igbo

This paper presents a finite state model of reduplication processes in Igbo. Identified Igbo reduplication processes are based on (i) verbal reduplication with prefixation, (ii) total nominal reduplication (iii) ideophone reduplication. However, this work identifies and includes a fourth and fifth type that occurs in the language, namely; (iv) adverbial reduplication and (v) prepositional reduplication. Xerox Finite State Tool (XFST) was used in representing the five Igbo reduplication processes computationally. Igbo verbal reduplication exhibits selective reduplication process and is characterized by prefixation and vowel replacement. Vowel harmony phenomenon was taken into consideration in achieving verbal reduplication to cater for phonological changes. Model testing results showed 84% accuracy in both analysis and recognition of reduplicated forms in Igbo

Normalized Google Distance for Collocation Extraction from Islamic Domain

This study investigates the properties of Arabic collocations, and classifies them according to their structural patterns on Islamic domain. Based on linguistic information, the patterns and the variation of the collocations have been identified.  Then, a system that extracts the collocations from Islamic domain based on statistical measures has been described. In candidate ranking, the normalized Google distance has been adapted to measure the associations between the words in the candidates set. Finally, the n-best evaluation that selects n-best lists for each association measure has been used to annotate all candidates in these lists manually. The following association measures (log-likelihood ratio, t-score, mutual information, and enhanced mutual information) have been utilized in the candidate ranking step to compare these measures with the normalized Google distance in Arabic collocation extraction. In the experiment of this work, the normalized Google distance achieved the highest precision value 93% compared with other association measures. In fact, this strengthens our motivation to utilize the normalized Google distance to measure the relatedness between the constituent words of the collocations instead of using the frequency-based association measures as in the state-of-the-art methods. Keywords: normalized Google distance, collocation extraction, Islamic domai

Probabilistic Reference to Suspect or Victim in Nationality Extraction from Unstructured Crime News Documents

There is valuable information in unstructured crime news documents which crime analysts must manually search for. To solve this issue, several information extraction models have been implemented, all of which are capable of being enhanced. This gap has created the motivation to propose an enhanced information extraction model that uses named entity recognition to extract the nationality from crime news documents and coreference resolution to associate the nationality to either the suspect or the victim. After the proposed model extracts the nationality, it references it to the suspect or victim by looking up all of the victim related keywords and the suspect related keywords within the text, and their corresponding distances from the position of the nationality keyword. Based on their total distances, a probability score algorithm decides whether the nationality is more likely to belong to either the victim or the suspect. Two experiments were conducted to evaluate the nationality extractor component and the reference identification component used by the model. The former experiment had achieved 90%, 94%, and 91% for precision, recall, and F-measure values respectively. The latter experiment had achieved 65%, 68%, and 66% for precision, recall, and F-measure respectively. The model had achieved promising results after evaluation. Keywords: information extraction, named entity recognition, coreference resolution, crime domai

Online News Headline Extraction

This paper presents the online headline news extraction application. According to research, today's online news has grown 11 % year over year. Users nowadays are overwhehned with too much on the internet. The current online news also is not visible for user to read the news; this is because it is full of the advertisement and other umelated thing besides the news itself. This paper pmposes the proposal of an EHeadlines News Extraction Framework that illustrated the extracted information on the news. This project will only cover the news reported or news available on the local online English newspaper and at the mean time try to extract the headlines of the news frrst. At the end of the project, it will highlight the application that can illustrate the extracted information on the news

A Case Study on Computational Hermeneutics: E. J. Lowe’s Modal Ontological Argument

Computers may help us to better understand (not just verify) arguments. In this article we defend this claim by showcasing the application of a new, computer-assisted interpretive method to an exemplary natural-language ar- gument with strong ties to metaphysics and religion: E. J. Lowe’s modern variant of St. Anselm’s ontological argument for the existence of God. Our new method, which we call computational hermeneutics, has been particularly conceived for use in interactive-automated proof assistants. It aims at shedding light on the meanings of words and sentences by framing their inferential role in a given argument. By employing automated theorem reasoning technology within interactive proof assistants, we are able to drastically reduce (by several orders of magnitude) the time needed to test the logical validity of an argu- ment’s formalization. As a result, a new approach to logical analysis, inspired by Donald Davidson’s account of radical interpretation, has been enabled. In computational hermeneutics, the utilization of automated reasoning tools ef- fectively boosts our capacity to expose the assumptions we indirectly commit ourselves to every time we engage in rational argumentation and it fosters the explicitation and revision of our concepts and commitments

An account of overt intentional dogwhistling

Political communication in modern democratic societies often requires the speaker to address multiple audiences with heterogeneous values, interests and agendas. This creates an incentive for communication strategies that allow politicians to send, along with the explicit content of their speech, concealed messages that seek to secure the approval of certain groups without alienating the rest of the electorate. These strategies have been labeled dogwhistling in recent literature. In this article, we provide an analysis of overt intentional dogwhistling (OID). We recognize two main stages within the OIDs’ way of conveying a concealed message: the expression of a perspective together with the transmission of an accompanying positioning message vis-à-vis the OID targeted sub-audience, and the inferential extraction (by the target audience) of a set of cognitive and non-cognitive contents inferred on the basis of the former stage. Furthermore, we identify three linguistic mechanisms whereby these contents may be transmitted: conventional meaning, conversational implicature and perlocutionary inferencing. Hence, on our view OIDs are not a uniform category, as they may differ as to what extent the concealed content is speaker-meant, and thus actually communicated by the speaker.Fil: Lo Guercio, Nicolás Francisco. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Parque Centenario. Instituto de Investigaciones Filosóficas. - Sociedad Argentina de Análisis Filosófico. Instituto de Investigaciones Filosóficas; ArgentinaFil: Caso, Ramiro. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Parque Centenario. Instituto de Investigaciones Filosóficas. - Sociedad Argentina de Análisis Filosófico. Instituto de Investigaciones Filosóficas; Argentina. Universidad de Buenos Aires; Argentin

Asking and Answering

Questions are everywhere and the ubiquitous activities of asking and answering, as most human activities, are susceptible to failure - at least from time to time. This volume offers several current approaches to the systematic study of questions and the surrounding activities and works toward supporting and improving these activities. The contributors formulate general problems for a formal treatment of questions, investigate specific kinds of questions, compare different frameworks with regard to how they regulate the activities of asking and answering of questions, and situate these activities in a wider framework of cognitive/epistemic discourse. From the perspectives of logic, linguistics, epistemology, and philosophy of language emerges a report on the state of the art of the theory of questions