The underlying conditionality of conditionals which do not use 'if'

In addressing a question at the semantics-pragmatics interface of how conditionals in English should be categorised, this paper addresses the underlying question: what is a conditional? Conditionals in English are very often associated with the canonical pattern ‘if p then q’. But while the word 'if' provides a simple function to aid us in expressing our conditional thought, it goes without saying that conditional thought does not go hand in hand with the single word 'if'. This paper explores some of the ways that conditionals may be expressed in English without using if by presenting observations obtained from the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB) combined with results from previous empirical studies (e.g. Declerck & Reed 2001). In doing so, this paper considers the question what exactly it is to be a conditional, proposing some criteria to guide the categorisation of conditional expressions. In turn, this paper aims to shed some light as to why conditionals using 'if' are so often focussed upon

Classifying conditionals: The case of metalinguistic 'if you like'

It is agreed that metalinguistic ‘if you like’ puts some aspect of communication into metalinguistic focus, serving the pragmatic function of commenting upon the appropriateness of the words uttered, but there is little consensus as to whether metalinguistic ‘if you like’ introduces a conditional. By taking observations from the International Corpus of English, this paper aims to show that utterances using metalinguistic ‘if you like’ belong in the class of conditional expressions. This is achieved by proposing pragmatic criteria to guide the categorisation of conditional expressions, where conditionality is not inherently linked to truth-conditional content. Next, this paper argues that ‘if you like’ can be classed in the broad category of speechact conditionals, where it is not the truth of the if-clause that provides the situations of truth of the main clause, but rather where the if-clause refers to the situations where the main clause is felicitously used. Finally, by utilising the semantic contextualist framework of Default Semantics (Jaszczolt 2010), this paper shows that ‘if you like’ is comparable to other if-clauses which overtly invoke a metalinguistic sense in a full phrase. In sum, this paper takes the case of ‘if you like’ as a case study in re-conceptualising the class of conditionals and truth-conditional content

BriskStream: Scaling Data Stream Processing on Shared-Memory Multicore Architectures

We introduce BriskStream, an in-memory data stream processing system (DSPSs) specifically designed for modern shared-memory multicore architectures. BriskStream's key contribution is an execution plan optimization paradigm, namely RLAS, which takes relative-location (i.e., NUMA distance) of each pair of producer-consumer operators into consideration. We propose a branch and bound based approach with three heuristics to resolve the resulting nontrivial optimization problem. The experimental evaluations demonstrate that BriskStream yields much higher throughput and better scalability than existing DSPSs on multi-core architectures when processing different types of workloads.Comment: To appear in SIGMOD'1

Single-Valued Hamiltonian via Legendre-Fenchel Transformation and Time Translation Symmetry

Under conventional Legendre transformation, systems with a non-convex Lagrangian will result in a multi-valued Hamiltonian as a function of conjugate momentum. This causes problems such as non-unitary time evolution of quantum state and non-determined motion of classical particles, and is physically unacceptable. In this work, we propose a new construction of single-valued Hamiltonian by applying Legendre-Fenchel transformation, which is a mathematically rigorous generalization of conventional Legendre transformation, valid for non-convex Lagrangian systems, but not yet widely known to the physics community. With the new single-valued Hamiltonian, we study spontaneous breaking of time translation symmetry and derive its vacuum state. Applications to theories of cosmology and gravitation are discussed.Comment: Journal Version, 16pp. All results + conclusions un-changed, only minor refinements to clarify the importance of our new LFT method and its physics applications; references adde

Communication-Efficient Federated Optimization over Semi-Decentralized Networks

In large-scale federated and decentralized learning, communication efficiency is one of the most challenging bottlenecks. While gossip communication -- where agents can exchange information with their connected neighbors -- is more cost-effective than communicating with the remote server, it often requires a greater number of communication rounds, especially for large and sparse networks. To tackle the trade-off, we examine the communication efficiency under a semi-decentralized communication protocol, in which agents can perform both agent-to-agent and agent-to-server communication in a probabilistic manner. We design a tailored communication-efficient algorithm over semi-decentralized networks, referred to as PISCO, which inherits the robustness to data heterogeneity thanks to gradient tracking and allows multiple local updates for saving communication. We establish the convergence rate of PISCO for nonconvex problems and show that PISCO enjoys a linear speedup in terms of the number of agents and local updates. Our numerical results highlight the superior communication efficiency of PISCO and its resilience to data heterogeneity and various network topologies