Related papers: Focus on ``only" and ``Not"
Pulman has shown that Higher--Order Unification (HOU) can be used to model the interpretation of focus. In this paper, we extend the unification--based approach to cases which are often seen as a test--bed for focus theory: utterances with…
This note clarifies the concept of syntax and semantics and their relationships. Today, a lot of confusion arises from the fact that the word "semantics" is used in different meanings. We discuss a general approach at defining semantics…
The FOCUS constraint expresses the notion that solutions are concentrated. In practice, this constraint suffers from the rigidity of its semantics. To tackle this issue, we propose three generalizations of the FOCUS constraint. We provide…
Focus, a framework for formal specification and development of interactive systems, was introduced approx. 25 years ago. Since then this approach was broadly used in academic and industrial studies, as well as provided a basis for a number…
The main goal of this paper is to evaluate knowledge base schemas, modeled as a set of entity types, each such type being associated with a set of properties, according to their focus. We intuitively model the notion of focus as ''the state…
Approximation Fixpoint Theory (AFT) is a powerful theory covering various semantics of non-monotonic reasoning formalisms in knowledge representation such as Logic Programming and Answer Set Programming. Many semantics of such non-monotonic…
This note points out a lemma on closures of monotonic increasing functions and shows how it is applicable to decomposition and modularity for semantics defined as the least fixedpoint of some monotonic function. In particular it applies to…
Over an algebraically closed field of positive characteristic, there exist rational functions with only one critical point. We give an elementary characterization of these functions in terms of their continued fraction expansions. Then we…
Low-level program analysis is a fundamental problem, taking the shape of "flow analysis" in functional languages and "points-to" analysis in imperative and object-oriented languages. Despite the similarities, the vocabulary and results in…
An attempt at unifying logic and functional programming is reported. As a starting point, we take the view that "logic programs" are not about logic but constitute inductive definitions of sets and relations. A skeletal language design…
Essentially being an extended abstract of the author's 1998 PhD thesis, this paper introduces an extension of the language of linear logic with a semantics which treats sentences as tasks rather than true/false statements. A resource is…
The article suggests a description of a system of tables with a set of special lists absorbing a semantics of data and reflects a fullness of data. It shows how their parallel processing can be constructed based on the descriptions. The…
The functional interpretation is a systematic, syntactic method for transforming certain non-constructive proofs into constructive proofs with explicit bounds. We illustrate the interpretation by working through a concrete, fairly simple…
Based on empirical evidence from a free word order language (German) we propose a fundamental revision of the principles guiding the ordering of discourse entities in the forward-looking centers within the centering model. We claim that…
Approximation fixpoint theory (AFT) is an abstract and general algebraic framework for studying the semantics of nonmonotonic logics. It provides a unifying study of the semantics of different formalisms for nonmonotonic reasoning, such as…
Philosophical thinking has a side effect: by aiming to find the essence of a diverse set of phenomena, it often makes it difficult to see the differences between them. This can be the case with Mathematics, Programming, Writing and…
Discourse particles are crucial elements that subtly shape the meaning of text. These words, often polyfunctional, give rise to nuanced and often quite disparate semantic/discourse effects, as exemplified by the diverse uses of the particle…
The intention of these notes is to give a mathematical account of how I believe students could be taught to think about functional programming languages and to explain how such languages work.
This work continues the development of an intensional approach to computability initiated in previous work, in which programs and computations, rather than functions, constitute the primary objects of study. In this setting, models of…
Fixpoints are ubiquitous in computer science and when dealing with quantitative semantics and verification one often considers least fixpoints of (higher-dimensional) functions over the non-negative reals. We show how to approximate the…