10 research outputs found
Investigating the Language of Uncertainty - experimental data, formal semantics & probabilistic pragmatics
This dissertation reports a series of studies about the language of uncertainty in English.
We investigate what we call “uncertainty expressions”, which include both verbal
probabilities such as probable and likely and epistemic modals such as might and
possible. Moreover, we look at complex, or nested, uncertainty expressions such as
certainly likely and might be possible. The issues investigated in this work lie at the
interface between semantics and pragmatics, and we attempt to answer questions such
as: How do speakers communicate under uncertainty and about uncertainty? And what
is the uncertainty intuitively expressed by uncertainty expressions? What do uncertainty
expressions actually mean? And what is the role of context when we use them
in a conversation? Almost as frequent as logical connectives and quantifiers, uncertainty expressions
are ubiquitous in everyday conversations. Unsurprisingly, uncertainty expressions have
been extensively investigated by philosophers, logicians, linguists and cognitive scientists.
One of the goals of this dissertation is to bring closer together the different
traditional approaches to the study of uncertainty expressions. In our investigation, we
strive for interdisciplinarity. In doing so, we integrate methods coming from formal
semantics and pragmatics with experimental data and computational modeling. The
focal point of the dissertation is a novel data-driven probabilistic model of the use and
the interpretation of simple and complex uncertainty expressions
Recensione: "La computabilità: algoritmi, logica, calcolatori" di Marcello Frixione e Dario Palladino
Complex probability expressions & higher-order uncertainty: Compositional semantics, probabilistic pragmatics & experimental data
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Modeling transfer of high-order uncertain information
Complex uncertainty expressions such as probably likely andcertainly possible naturally occur in everyday conversations.However, they received much less attention in the literaturethan simple ones. We propose a probabilistic model of the useand interpretation of complex uncertainty expressions based onthe assumption that their predominant function is to communi-cate factual information about the world, and that further layersof uncertainty are pragmatically inferred. We collected empir-ical data on the use and interpretation of these expressions anduse it for detailed model criticism