SCF2 - an Argumentation Semantics for Rational Human Judgments on Argument Acceptability

In abstract argumentation theory, many argumentation semantics have been proposed for evaluating argumentation frameworks. This paper is based on the following research question: Which semantics corresponds well to what humans consider a rational judgment on the acceptability of arguments? There are two systematic ways to approach this research question: A normative perspective is provided by the principle-based approach, in which semantics are evaluated based on their satisfaction of various normatively desirable principles. A descriptive perspective is provided by the empirical approach, in which cognitive studies are conducted to determine which semantics best predicts human judgments about arguments. In this paper, we combine both approaches to motivate a new argumentation semantics called SCF2. For this purpose, we introduce and motivate two new principles and show that no semantics from the literature satisfies both of them. We define SCF2 and prove that it satisfies both new principles. Furthermore, we discuss findings of a recent empirical cognitive study that provide additional support to SCF2

The building and application of a semantic platform for an e-research society

This thesis reviews the area of e-Research (the use of electronic infrastructure to support research) and considers how the insight gained from the development of social networking sites in the early 21st century might assist researchers in using this infrastructure. In particular it examines the myExperiment project, a website for e-Research that allows users to upload, share and annotate work flows and associated files, using a social networking framework. This Virtual Organisation (VO) supports many of the attributes required to allow a community of users to come together to build an e-Research society. The main focus of the thesis is how the emerging society that is developing out of my-Experiment could use Semantic Web technologies to provide users with a significantly richer representation of their research and research processes to better support reproducible research. One of the initial major contributions was building an ontology for myExperiment. Through this it became possible to build an API for generating and delivering this richer representation and an interface for querying it. Having this richer representation it has been possible to follow Linked Data principles to link up with other projects that have this type of representation. Doing this has allowed additional data to be provided to the user and has begun to set in context the data produced by myExperiment. The way that the myExperiment project has gone about this task and consideration of how changes may affect existing users, is another major contribution of this thesis. Adding a semantic representation to an emergent e-Research society like myExperiment,has given it the potential to provide additional applications. In particular the capability to support Research Objects, an encapsulation of a scientist's research or research process to support reproducibility. The insight gained by adding a semantic representation to myExperiment, has allowed this thesis to contribute towards the design of the architecture for these Research Objects that use similar Semantic Web technologies. The myExperiment ontology has been designed such that it can be aligned with other ontologies. Scientific Discourse, the collaborative argumentation of different claims and hypotheses, with the support of evidence from experiments, to construct, confirm or disprove theories requires the capability to represent experiments carried out in silico. This thesis discusses how, as part of the HCLS Scientific Discourse subtask group, the myExperiment ontology has begun to be aligned with other scientific discourse ontologies to provide this capability. It also compares this alignment of ontologies with the architecture for Research Objects. This thesis has also examines how myExperiment's Linked Data and that of other projects can be used in the design of novel interfaces. As a theoretical exercise, it considers how this Linked Data might be used to support a Question-Answering system, that would allow users to query myExperiment's data in a more efficient and user-friendly way. It concludes by reviewing all the steps undertaken to provide a semantic platform for an emergent e-Research society to facilitate the sharing of research and its processes to support reproducible research. It assesses their contribution to enhancing the features provided by myExperiment, as well as e-Research as a whole. It considers how the contributions provided by this thesis could be extended to produce additional tools that will allow researchers to make greater use of the rich data that is now available, in a way that enhances their research process rather than significantly changing it or adding extra workload

Unifying Structure-Building in Human Language: The Minimalist Syntax of Idioms

Idioms have traditionally posed difficulties for different syntactic frameworks, because they behave in some senses like lexical items but in other senses like syntactically complex phrases. In particular, despite showing evidence of having internal syntactic structure, they have apparently limited syntactic flexibility relative to non-idiomatic phrases. This dissertation proposes a Minimalist architecture which makes a sharp distinction between the lexicon and the syntax, but nonetheless accounts for the hybrid properties of idioms. I argue that idioms, like non-idiomatic structures, are built by iterative application of Merge, preserving the Minimalist notion that there is a single basic structure-building operation, Merge, in natural language. However, idioms are also stored wholesale in the lexicon in the form of syntactic structures with associated phonological and semantic representations. These lexically stored idioms do not serve as input to structure building through Merge. Rather, if the syntactic derivation builds a structure which matches a lexically stored idiom, then that structure may optionally be interpreted via the lexically stored idiom meaning. Given my proposal that all idioms are built by means of Merge, I analyze extensive evidence for syntactic flexibility across different types of idioms, and argue that the apparent limitations on the syntactic flexibility of idioms can be explained without positing any idiom-specific restrictions. Rather, I explain how the conceptual-intentional interface imposes independent semantic restrictions that constrain the syntactic derivation of particular idioms, accounting for distinctions that include the much-discussed contrast between decomposable idioms (whose meaning is distributed among their parts, e.g. spill the beans, in which spill can be paraphrased as ‘divulge’ and beans can be paraphrased as ‘secret’) and non-decomposable idioms (whose meaning is not distributed among their parts, e.g. kick the bucket, in which no independent meaning can be identified for kick or bucket). The semantic representations I propose for non-decomposable idioms are associated with their entire lexically stored structure, unlike those for decomposable idioms. This distinction interacts with independent semantic constraints to explain the apparently limited syntactic flexibility of non-decomposable idioms relative to decomposable idioms. This approach extends to idioms a unified structure-building procedure for natural language, while explaining the linguistic properties of idioms in a principled way, consistent with Minimalist assumptions.PHDLinguisticsUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/138471/1/wnediger_1.pd

Truth in sentential structure: a critical analysis of standard semantic accounts of context sensitivity

The principal aim of this thesis is to assess the view that the formal properties of sentences of natural languages encode truth-conditions. The question I pursue is whether truth-conditional semantic theories are capable of accounting for the various ways in which contextual factors contribute to the determination of the truth-conditional content of sentences. The thesis will assess and evaluate three different approaches standard contemporary truth-conditional semanticists have set forth in response to what I shall refer to as the challenge from pervasive context sensitivity, which is essentially the claim that context plays a more extensive role in the determination of content than that of fixing the semantic values of standard indexical expressions. I shall aim to show that each of the approaches mentioned fails to provide an adequate account of how the phenomenon of context sensitivity can be explained on the basis of our linguistic competence alone, and shall then explore some of the consequences of this