189,281 research outputs found
Illusive wide scope of universal quantifiers
It is widely believed that existential quantifiers can bring about the semantic effects of a scope which is wider than their actual syntactic scope (See Fodor & Sag (1982), Cresti (1995), Kratzer (1995), Reinhart (1995) and Winter (1995), among many others.) On the other hand, it is assumed that the syntactic scope of universal quantifiers can be determined unequivocally by the semantics. This paper shows that this second assumption is wrong; universal quantifiers can also bring about scope illusions, though in a very specific environment. In particular, we argue that in the environment of generic tense, universal quantifiers can show the semantic effects of a scope which is wider than the one that is actually realized at LF. Our argument has four steps. First, we show that in generic contexts, universal quantifiers escape standard “scope-islands” (Section 1). Second, we show how the effects of wide scope in generic contexts can be achieved without syntactic wide scope (Section 2.1). Third, we show that this result is actually forced on us, once we take seriously certain independent issues concerning the interpretation of generic tense (Sections 2.2 - 2.4). Finally, the semantics of generic tense and, in particular, its interaction with focus, will yield some intricate new predictions, which, as we show, are borne out (Sections 3 - 5)
Variable types for meaning assembly: a logical syntax for generic noun phrases introduced by most
This paper proposes a way to compute the meanings associated with sentences
with generic noun phrases corresponding to the generalized quantifier most. We
call these generics specimens and they resemble stereotypes or prototypes in
lexical semantics. The meanings are viewed as logical formulae that can
thereafter be interpreted in your favourite models. To do so, we depart
significantly from the dominant Fregean view with a single untyped universe.
Indeed, our proposal adopts type theory with some hints from Hilbert
\epsilon-calculus (Hilbert, 1922; Avigad and Zach, 2008) and from medieval
philosophy, see e.g. de Libera (1993, 1996). Our type theoretic analysis bears
some resemblance with ongoing work in lexical semantics (Asher 2011; Bassac et
al. 2010; Moot, Pr\'evot and Retor\'e 2011). Our model also applies to
classical examples involving a class, or a generic element of this class, which
is not uttered but provided by the context. An outcome of this study is that,
in the minimalism-contextualism debate, see Conrad (2011), if one adopts a type
theoretical view, terms encode the purely semantic meaning component while
their typing is pragmatically determined
Online Optimization Methods for the Quantification Problem
The estimation of class prevalence, i.e., the fraction of a population that
belongs to a certain class, is a very useful tool in data analytics and
learning, and finds applications in many domains such as sentiment analysis,
epidemiology, etc. For example, in sentiment analysis, the objective is often
not to estimate whether a specific text conveys a positive or a negative
sentiment, but rather estimate the overall distribution of positive and
negative sentiments during an event window. A popular way of performing the
above task, often dubbed quantification, is to use supervised learning to train
a prevalence estimator from labeled data.
Contemporary literature cites several performance measures used to measure
the success of such prevalence estimators. In this paper we propose the first
online stochastic algorithms for directly optimizing these
quantification-specific performance measures. We also provide algorithms that
optimize hybrid performance measures that seek to balance quantification and
classification performance. Our algorithms present a significant advancement in
the theory of multivariate optimization and we show, by a rigorous theoretical
analysis, that they exhibit optimal convergence. We also report extensive
experiments on benchmark and real data sets which demonstrate that our methods
significantly outperform existing optimization techniques used for these
performance measures.Comment: 26 pages, 6 figures. A short version of this manuscript will appear
in the proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery
and Data Mining, KDD 201
A formal theory of conceptual modeling universals
Conceptual Modeling is a discipline of great relevance to several areas in Computer Science. In a series of papers [1,2,3] we have been using the General Ontological Language (GOL) and its underlying upper level ontology, proposed in [4,5], to evaluate the ontological correctness of conceptual models and to develop guidelines for how the constructs of a modeling language (UML) should be used in conceptual modeling. In this paper, we focus on the modeling metaconcepts of classifiers and objects from an ontological point of view. We use a philosophically and psychologically well-founded theory of universals to propose a UML profile for Ontology Representation and Conceptual Modeling. The formal semantics of the proposed modeling elements is presented in a language of modal logics with quantification restricted to Sortal universals
Efficient Solving of Quantified Inequality Constraints over the Real Numbers
Let a quantified inequality constraint over the reals be a formula in the
first-order predicate language over the structure of the real numbers, where
the allowed predicate symbols are and . Solving such constraints is
an undecidable problem when allowing function symbols such or . In
the paper we give an algorithm that terminates with a solution for all, except
for very special, pathological inputs. We ensure the practical efficiency of
this algorithm by employing constraint programming techniques
The Function is Unsaturated
An investigation of what Frege means by his doctrine that functions (and so concepts) are 'unsaturated'. We argue that this doctrine is far less peculiar than it is usually taken to be. What makes it hard to understand, oddly enough, is the fact that it is so deeply embedded in our contemporary understanding of logic and language. To see this, we look at how it emerges out of Frege's confrontation with the Booleans and how it expresses a fundamental difference between Frege's approach to logic and theirs
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