Clinical trials have been the main tool used by the health sciences community to test and evaluate interventions, Trials can fall into two broad categories: pragmatic and explanatory. Pragmatic trials are designed to evaluate the effectiveness of interventions in real-life routine practice conditions, whereas explanatory trials aim to test whether an intervention works under optimal situations....

This paper describes a framework for recognizing contradictions between multiple text sources by relying on three forms of linguistic information: (a) negation; (b) antonymy; and (c) semantic and pragmatic information associated with the discourse relations. Two views of contradictions are considered, in which a novel method of recognizing contrast and of finding antonymies are described. Contr...

Interlanguage pragmatics, as an inseparable part of communicative competence, has been emphasized as an ultimate objective in language learning. This study explored the perceptions of Iranian English as a foreign language (EFL) students regarding interlanguage pragmatics and the impact of textbooks tasks on shaping their pragmatic competence. To accomplish this objective, 137 senior EFL student...

this study examines the efficiency of pedagogical intervention in raising l2 pragmatic awareness of the iranian efl learners. more specifically, it seeks to investigate the difference between explicit and implicit instructions in improving pragmatic appropriateness of the english refusals by adult persian native speakers in an efl classroom context. fifty-four participants, with approximately t...

In this paper we present a language with a temporal ontology adequate for representing the facts retrieved from a text. The semantics of this representation language completes some of the information conveyed by text sentences in a suitable way for the pragmatic interpretation of text temporal entities. We also present the translation of the knowledge base language into a Logic Programming fram...

Recently a number of authors have tried to avoid the failures of traditional Dutch book arguments by separating them from pragmatic concerns of avoiding a sure loss. In this paper I examine defenses of this kind by Howson and Urbach, Hellman, and Christensen. I construct rigorous explications of their arguments and show that they are not cogent. I advocate abandoning Dutch book arguments in fav...

This paper describes the design of pragmatic-interpretation and dialogue-management modules in an automatic inquiry system that can be consulted through spoken natural language over the telephone. The system is designed around a central multi-level data structure representing the discourse that has unfolded during the dialogue. At the highest level of this discourse representation the informati...

We present a model of semantic processing of spoken language that (a) is robust against ill-formed input, such as can be expected from automatic speech recognisers, (b) respects both syntactic and pragmatic constraints in the computation of most likely interpretations, (c) uses a principled, expressive semantic representation formalism (RMRS) with a well-defined model theory, and (d) works cont...

This paper presents a modular TTS system (called MINGUS) which exploits syntactic information contained in the input and allows additional annotation of the input in order to obtain particular intonation contours or to vary most prosodic parameters. This system is based on a tonal representation of French intonation, on a model of the interaction between syntax and prosody, and on a model of th...

How can mathematical models which represent the causal structure of the world incompletely or incorrectly have any scientific value? I argue that this apparent puzzle is an artifact of a realist emphasis on representation in the philosophy of modeling. I offer an alternative, pragmatic methodology of modeling, inspired by classic papers by modelers themselves. The crux of the view is that model...