INTRODUCTION A stay in the intensive care unit (ICU), although potentially life-saving, may cause considerable discomfort to patients. However, retrospective assessment of discomfort is difficult because recollection of stressful events may be impaired by sedation and severe illness during the ICU stay. This study addresses the following questions. What is the incidence of discomfort reported b...

Current question answering tasks handle definitional questions by seeking answers which are factual in nature. While factual answers are a very important component in defining entities, a wealth of qualitative data is often ignored. In this incipient work, we define qualitative dimensions (credibility, sentiment, contradictions etc.) for evaluating answers to definitional questions and we explo...

Sentences using ‘ought’ appear to have some kind of non-descriptive force (e.g. commending, guiding actions, committing the speaker), in which case it would seem that no ‘ought’ statement can follow logically from purely factual statements lacking such force. Yet from factual statements about slowness and liability to breakdown of alternative means of transport it seems possible validly to infe...

Stories can be a powerful vehicle of persuasion. We typically use stories to link known events into coherent wholes. One way to establish coherence is to appeal to past examples, real or fictitious. These examples can be chosen and critiqued using legal case-based reasoning (CBR) techniques. In this paper, we apply these techniques to factual stories, assessing a story about the facts using pre...

A hedge is a linguistic device used to avoid using a categorical sentence. Hedges can be used to determine whether a sentence is factual by merely regarding a sentence containing hedges as non-factual. In this paper, we perform a comparative experiment of various classification methods for hedge detection. Among four different classification methods, we observe that SVM shows the best performan...

Software maintenance activities can be organizationally combined with or separated from software development. Proponents have argued advantages for each mode, but factual evidence on the respective results and conditions has been missing. This paper reports evidence gathered from sites organized in the two ways and contrasts their characteristics. Significant differences appear that give a bett...