Hedged Assertion

Surprisingly little has been written about hedged assertion. Linguists often focus on semantic or syntactic theorizing about, for example, grammatical evidentials or epistemic modals, but pay far less attention to what hedging does at the level of action. By contrast, philosophers have focused extensively on normative issues regarding what epistemic position is required for proper assertion, yet they have almost exclusively considered unqualified declaratives. This essay considers the linguistic and normative issues side-by-side. We aim to bring some order and clarity to thinking about hedging, so as to illuminate aspects of interest to both linguists and philosophers. In particular, we consider three broad questions. 1) The structural question: when one hedges, what is the speaker’s commitment weakened from? 2) The functional question: what is the best way to understand how a hedge weakens? And 3) the taxonomic question: are hedged assertions genuine assertions, another speech act, or what

Feasibility report: Delivering case-study based learning using artificial intelligence and gaming technologies

This document describes an investigation into the technical feasibility of a game to support learning based on case studies. Information systems students using the game will conduct fact-finding interviews with virtual characters. We survey relevant technologies in computational linguistics and games. We assess the applicability of the various approaches and propose an architecture for the game based on existing techniques. We propose a phased development plan for the development of the game

A Model of Redundant Information in Dialogue: The Role of Resource Bounds (Dissertation Proposal)

This document is a proposal of research intended to complete a Ph.D. in Computer Science. The overall goal of the proposed work is to demonstrate a connection between agents as limited reasoners and the use of informationally redundant utterances in problem-solving dialogues. This document describes some long range objectives and some preliminary results toward this goal. Comments from readers on the proposed work would be most welcome

The Language of the cybersouls

Debates about technology are mostly staged in a grand setting: presented as the sinister toolkit of authoritarian organisations, or as the progressive fabric of the future. Yet everyone is involved in technology as part of every microscopic action in every humdrum life. How do theories about technology cope with this political spectrum? One option is to treat technology as we treat language and specifically use Wittgenstein’s language games as an analogy. So that technology, like language, becomes inseparable from us and an intimate part of us, and this merging of technology and the human transforms us all into cyborgs