Computing Presuppositions by Contextual Reasoning

This paper describes how automated deduction methods for natural language processing can be applied more efficiently by encoding context in a more elaborate way. Our work is based on formal approaches to context, and we provide a tableau calculus for contextual reasoning. This is explained by considering an example from the problem area of presupposition projection.Comment: 5 page

Hierarchical contextual reasoning

Computer supported development of proofs requires user interaction even for theorems that are simple by human standards. In this thesis we define a communication infrastructure as a mediator between the user and the automatic reasoning procedures. It is based on a new uniform meta proof theory for contextual reasoning and encompasses most aspects of communication from the presentation of the proof state, via the supply of relevant contextual information about possible proof continuations, to the support for a hierarchical proof development. The proof theory is uniform for a variety of logics. It exploits proof theoretic annotations in formulas for a contextual reasoning style that is as far as possible intuitive for the user while at the same time still adequate for automatic reasoning procedures. Furthermore, concepts are defined to accomodate both the use and the explicit representation of hierarchies that are inherent in problem solving in general.Das computergestuetzte Beweisen von Theoremen erfordert den Eingriff des menschlichen Benutzers selbst fuer nach menschlichen Maßstaeben einfache Theoreme. Diese Arbeit definiert eine Kommunikationsplattform, die eine synergetische Kooperationsform des Benutzers mit dem Beweisverfahren ermöglicht

Human-Machine CRFs for Identifying Bottlenecks in Holistic Scene Understanding

Recent trends in image understanding have pushed for holistic scene understanding models that jointly reason about various tasks such as object detection, scene recognition, shape analysis, contextual reasoning, and local appearance based classifiers. In this work, we are interested in understanding the roles of these different tasks in improved scene understanding, in particular semantic segmentation, object detection and scene recognition. Towards this goal, we "plug-in" human subjects for each of the various components in a state-of-the-art conditional random field model. Comparisons among various hybrid human-machine CRFs give us indications of how much "head room" there is to improve scene understanding by focusing research efforts on various individual tasks

Designing for Diabetes Decision Support Systems with Fluid Contextual Reasoning

Type 1 diabetes is a potentially life-threatening chronic condition that requires frequent interactions with diverse data to inform treatment decisions. While mobile technolo- gies such as blood glucose meters have long been an essen- tial part of this process, designing interfaces that explicitly support decision-making remains challenging. Dual-process models are a common approach to understanding such cog- nitive tasks. However, evidence from the first of two stud- ies we present suggests that in demanding and complex situations, some individuals approach disease management in distinctive ways that do not seem to fit well within existing models. This finding motivated, and helped frame our second study, a survey (n=192) to investigate these behaviors in more detail. On the basis of the resulting analysis, we posit Fluid Contextual Reasoning to explain how some people with diabetes respond to particular situations, and discuss how an extended framework might help inform the design of user interfaces for diabetes management

COBRA Frames: Contextual Reasoning about Effects and Harms of Offensive Statements

Warning: This paper contains content that may be offensive or upsetting. Understanding the harms and offensiveness of statements requires reasoning about the social and situational context in which statements are made. For example, the utterance "your English is very good" may implicitly signal an insult when uttered by a white man to a non-white colleague, but uttered by an ESL teacher to their student would be interpreted as a genuine compliment. Such contextual factors have been largely ignored by previous approaches to toxic language detection. We introduce COBRA frames, the first context-aware formalism for explaining the intents, reactions, and harms of offensive or biased statements grounded in their social and situational context. We create COBRACORPUS, a dataset of 33k potentially offensive statements paired with machine-generated contexts and free-text explanations of offensiveness, implied biases, speaker intents, and listener reactions. To study the contextual dynamics of offensiveness, we train models to generate COBRA explanations, with and without access to the context. We find that explanations by context-agnostic models are significantly worse than by context-aware ones, especially in situations where the context inverts the statement's offensiveness (29% accuracy drop). Our work highlights the importance and feasibility of contextualized NLP by modeling social factors.Comment: Accepted to Findings of ACL 202

Islamic Jurisprudence for Diversity: From Theological-Normative Reason to Progressive Contextual Reasoning

The reality of Indonesian society is a multicultural society. Therefore, religious understanding and toleration to differences and diversity is necessary to be developed in order to create peace and harmony in the social life. This paper aims to explore the concept of Islamic Jurisprudence in the context of social diversity. This concept is important because the old fiqh concept resting on normative-theological reasonings needs to be reconstructed and replaced with contextual-progressive ones. The changes in the fiqh epistemology from normative-theological to contextual-progressive reasonings are carried out through adaptation to principles of Maqâshid al-Sharîah (basic aims of religious provisions) which are contextualized according to the social growth. The new model of fiqh constructed through combination of religious teachings and social development is expected to make a valuable contribution to the establishment of peace and harmony among all elements of Indonesia society