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In Technology and the Lifeworld (1990), Don Ihde advances what he calls "formalisms" for the ways in which we experience or relate to technology. In this article, I seek to clarify the grammar of Ihde's formalisms. Ihde's formalisms have not been the focus of scrutiny. Rather, they have largely been received in the literature as merely aphoristic or epigrammatical devices serving to clarify what can be explained in prose. My hypothesis is that Ihde's formalisms do not merely serve an epigrammatical function but rather admit of a generative grammar that extends his postphenomenological framework. I propose a notation that adheres to six rules of syntax that can be derived from Ihde's framework. I show that the proposed notation makes explicit the inter-relations among hidden dimensions of human–technology relations. Relying on my notation, I also suggest that the so-called cyborg turn is actually a turn away from the unharnessed syntax of Ihde's formalisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Built on the basis of the methods developed for Princeton WordNet and EuroWordNet, Arabic WordNet (AWN) has been an interesting project which combines WordNet structure compliance with Arabic particularities. In this paper, some AWN shortcomings related to coverage and usability are addressed. The use of AWN in question/answering (Q/A) helped us to deeply evaluate the resource from an experience-based perspective. Accordingly, an enrichment of AWN was built by semi-automatically extending its content. Indeed, existing approaches and/or resources developed for other languages were adapted and used for AWN. The experiments conducted in Arabic Q/A have shown an improvement of both AWN coverage as well as usability. Concerning coverage, a great amount of named entities extracted from YAGO were connected with corresponding AWN synsets. Also, a significant number of new verbs and nouns (including Broken Plural forms) were added. In terms of usability, thanks to the use of AWN, the performance for the AWN-based Q/A application registered an overall improvement with respect to the following three measures: accuracy (+9.27 % improvement), mean reciprocal rank (+3.6 improvement) and number of answered questions (+12.79 % improvement). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recursive descent parsing method for the context-free grammars is extended for their generalization, Boolean grammars, which include explicit set-theoretic operations in the formalism of rules and which are formally defined by language equations. The algorithm is applicable to a subset of Boolean grammars. The complexity of a direct implementation varies between linear and exponential, while memoization keeps it down to linear. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Korean Combinatory Categorial Grammar (KCCG) is an extended combinatory categorial grammar formalism to capture the syntax and interpretation of a ``relative free'' word order, long distance scrambling, and other specific characteristics of Korean. KCCG formalism can uniformly handle word order variations among arguments and adjuncts within a clause, as well as in complex clauses and across clause boundaries, i.e. long distance scrambling. The approach we develop takes advantage of the ability of CCG for type raising and composition along with the ability of variable categories and unordered argument modeling for relatively free word order treatment (Lee et al., 1994; Lee et al., 1997). We apply a probability model and heuristics using Korean characteristics to our KCCG parser. Results of the experiments on various text genre show that the KCCG parser performs at 87.67/87.03% constituent precision/recall. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract. Synchronized extension systems (SE-systems, for short) are 4-tuples G = (V, L[sub 1], L[sub 2], S), where V is an alphabet and L[sub 1], L[sub 2] and S are languages over V. They generate languages extending L[sub 1] by L[sub 2] to the left or to the right, and synchronizing on words in S. Such systems appear naturally when considering stacks, queues, grammar-like generative devices, splicing systems, zigzag-codes etc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes minimalism and truth-value gaps. Minimalism about truth has two parts, one negative and one positive. It is tempting to start with an attempt to characterize the negative. The author's aim here is to find a middle path, a compromise that sees the best in both positions. On one side there are the compatibilists who hold that one can quite consistently embrace a minimalist theory of truth, whilst isolating a set of meaningful declarative sentences which do not have truth-values. Opposed to them are the incompatibilists. The incompatibilists hold that once one accepts a minimalist account of truth, one is forced to say that all the meaningful declarative sentences possess truth-values.