89 research outputs found
De Finettian Logics of Indicative Conditionals Part I: Trivalent Semantics and Validity
This paper explores trivalent truth conditions for indicative conditionals, examining the “defective” truth table proposed by de Finetti (1936) and Reichenbach (1935, 1944). On their approach, a conditional takes the value of its consequent whenever its antecedent is true, and the value Indeterminate otherwise. Here we deal with the problem of selecting an adequate notion of validity for this conditional. We show that all standard validity schemes based on de Finetti’s table come with some problems, and highlight two ways out of the predicament: one pairs de Finetti’s conditional (DF) with validity as the preservation of non-false values (TT-validity), but at the expense of Modus Ponens; the other modifies de Finetti’s table to restore Modus Ponens. In Part I of this paper, we present both alternatives, with specific attention to a variant of de Finetti’s table (CC) proposed by Cooper (Inquiry 11, 295–320, 1968) and Cantwell (Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 49, 245–260, 2008). In Part II, we give an in-depth treatment of the proof theory of the resulting logics, DF/TT and CC/TT: both are connexive logics, but with significantly different algebraic properties
De Finettian Logics of Indicative Conditionals Part II: Proof Theory and Algebraic Semantics
In Part I of this paper, we identified and compared various schemes for trivalent truth conditions for indicative conditionals, most notably the proposals by de Finetti (1936) and Reichenbach (1935, 1944) on the one hand, and by Cooper ( Inquiry , 11 , 295–320, 1968) and Cantwell ( Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic , 49 , 245–260, 2008) on the other. Here we provide the proof theory for the resulting logics and , using tableau calculi and sequent calculi, and proving soundness and completeness results. Then we turn to the algebraic semantics, where both logics have substantive limitations: allows for algebraic completeness, but not for the construction of a canonical model, while fails the construction of a Lindenbaum-Tarski algebra. With these results in mind, we draw up the balance and sketch future research projects
Measuring vagueness and subjectivity in texts: from symbolic to neural VAGO
We present a hybrid approach to the automated measurement of vagueness and
subjectivity in texts. We first introduce the expert system VAGO, we illustrate
it on a small benchmark of fact vs. opinion sentences, and then test it on the
larger French press corpus FreSaDa to confirm the higher prevalence of
subjective markers in satirical vs. regular texts. We then build a neural clone
of VAGO, based on a BERT-like architecture, trained on the symbolic VAGO scores
obtained on FreSaDa. Using explainability tools (LIME), we show the interest of
this neural version for the enrichment of the lexicons of the symbolic version,
and for the production of versions in other languages.Comment: Paper to appear in the Proceedings of the 2023 IEEE International
Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology (WI-IAT
Trivalent Conditionals: Truth Conditions, Probability and Bayesian Inference
This paper develops a trivalent semantics for indicative conditionals and extends it to a probabilistic theory of valid inference and inductive learning with conditionals.} On this account, (i) all complex conditionals can be rephrased as simple conditionals, connecting our account to Adams's theory of p-valid inference; (ii) we obtain Stalnaker's Thesis as a theorem while avoiding the well-known triviality results; (iii) we generalize Bayesian conditionalization to an updating principle for conditional sentences. The final result is a unified semantic and probabilistic theory of conditionals with attractive results and predictions
Exposing propaganda: an analysis of stylistic cues comparing human annotations and machine classification
This paper investigates the language of propaganda and its stylistic
features. It presents the PPN dataset, standing for Propagandist Pseudo-News, a
multisource, multilingual, multimodal dataset composed of news articles
extracted from websites identified as propaganda sources by expert agencies. A
limited sample from this set was randomly mixed with papers from the regular
French press, and their URL masked, to conduct an annotation-experiment by
humans, using 11 distinct labels. The results show that human annotators were
able to reliably discriminate between the two types of press across each of the
labels. We propose different NLP techniques to identify the cues used by the
annotators, and to compare them with machine classification. They include the
analyzer VAGO to measure discourse vagueness and subjectivity, a TF-IDF to
serve as a baseline, and four different classifiers: two RoBERTa-based models,
CATS using syntax, and one XGBoost combining syntactic and semantic features.Comment: Paper to appear in the EACL 2024 Proceedings of the Third Workshop on
Understanding Implicit and Underspecified Language (UnImplicit 2024
The Dialogical Entailment Task
In this paper, a critical discussion is made of the role of entailments in the so-called New Paradigm of psychology of reasoning based on Bayesian models of rationality (Elqayam & Over, 2013). It is argued that assessments of probabilistic coherence cannot stand on their own, but that they need to be integrated with empirical studies of intuitive entailment judgments. This need is motivated not just by the requirements of probability theory itself, but also by a need to enhance the interdisciplinary integration of the psychology of reasoning with formal semantics in linguistics. The constructive goal of the paper is to introduce a new experimental paradigm, called the Dialogical Entailment task, to supplement current trends in the psychology of reasoning towards investigating knowledge-rich, social reasoning under uncertainty (Oaksford and Chater, 2019). As a case study, this experimental paradigm is applied to reasoning with conditionals and negation operators (e.g. CEM, wide and narrow negation). As part of the investigation, participants’ entailment judgments are evaluated against their probability evaluations to assess participants’ cross-task consistency over two experimental sessions
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