Effectively Solving NP-SPEC Encodings by Translation to ASP

NP-SPEC is a language for specifying problems in NP in a declarative way. Despite the fact that the semantics of the language was given by referring to Datalog with circumscription, which is very close to ASP, so far the only existing implementations are by means of ECLiPSe Prolog and via Boolean satisfiability solvers. In this paper, we present translations from NP-SPEC into ASP, and provide an experimental evaluation of existing implementations and the proposed translations to ASP using various ASP solvers. The results show that translating to ASP clearly has an edge over the existing translation into SAT, which involves an intrinsic grounding process. We also argue that it might be useful to incorporate certain language constructs of NPSPEC into mainstream ASP

Changing Face of the Extrasolar Giant Planet, HD 209458b

High-resolution atmospheric flow simulations of the tidally-locked extrasolar giant planet, HD 209458b, show large-scale spatio-temporal variability. This is in contrast to the simple, permanent day/night (i.e., hot/cold) picture. The planet's global circulation is characterized by a polar vortex in motion around each pole and a banded structure corresponding to ~3 broad zonal (east-west) jets. For very strong jets, the circulation-induced temperature difference between moving hot and cold regions can reach up to ~1000 K, suggesting that atmospheric variability could be observed in the planet's spectral and photometric signatures.Comment: 6 pages, 1 ps figure, 2 low-res color figures (JPEG). Figure 3 updated. Contact authors for hi-res versions of color figures. Accepted for publication in ApJ

05171 Abstracts Collection -- Nonmonotonic Reasoning, Answer Set Programming and Constraints

From 24.04.05 to 29.04.05, the Dagstuhl Seminar 05171 ``Nonmonotonic Reasoning, Answer Set Programming and Constraints\u27\u27 was held in the International Conference and Research Center (IBFI), Schloss Dagstuhl. During the seminar, several participants presented their current research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of seminar results and ideas are put together in this paper. The first section describes the seminar topics and goals in general. Links to extended abstracts or full papers are provided, if available

Topics in Chinese syntax : word order in synchrony and diachrony.

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:DXN035550 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

The structure of the Bangla DP

The thesis offers a description and analysis of the DP in the Eastern Indo-Aryan language Bangla (Bengali). In particular, it re-establishes the dominant theme in the DP literature of showing the syntactic equivalence between the structure of the clause and that of the DP. This is done on the one hand by investigating various clause-like syntactic phenomena like specificity, deixis and aspect inside the DP and on the other by working out NP movement inside the DP -- the common theme across chapters 2-4. Chapter 1 provides an outline of the thesis and introduces relevant parts of the minimalist and the antisymmetry framework adopted for this study. In addition, it suggests a trigger for Merge and proposes that a condition governing XP movements to multiple specifiers in clauses is operative in DPs as well. The second chapter discusses a three layered structure of the DP structure for Bangla where the layer intermediate between DP and NP is the Quantifier Phrase. The proposed structure accounts for the DP-internal specificity in Bangla and suggests that specific NPs move out of the deepest NP-shell by LF. This is identified as the DP-internal 'Object' Shift and constitutes the first instance of DP- internal NP movement. In the following chapter, the three-layered DP structure is re-examined on the basis of data from kinship terms. Specifically, it is shown that the possessive is generated in the nP shell of the DP but moves up to its derived position of [Spec,DP] for reasons of feature checking. It is proposed that the demonstrative is an XP and is the specifier of a 'focus-related' head F, located between the D and the Q heads. NP movement proposed in this chapter is identified as Kinship Inversion and is shown to be triggered by the same feature of specificity explored in chapter 2. The analysis exploits two different types of NP movement within the DP which accounts for DP-internal deixis. The last chapter discusses the structure of the gerund phrase and proposes that it too has the structure of a DP. Both the external and the internal distribution of the gerund is investigated which show that they exhibit both nominal and verbal properties. This is reflected in the proposed derivation of gerunds which involve leftward NP movement out of a VP embedded inside an Aspect Phrase. The presence of aspectual features like [±PERFECT] and [±DELIMITED] drive this movement. This final evidence for DP-internal NP movement leads us towards the conclusion that NP movement inside the DP is a pervasive phenomenon in Bangla