In this paper, we discuss issues connected to the phenomenon of linguistic FOCUS or INFORMATION DISTRIBUTION in the sentence in the context of the multi-lingual machine translation project EUROTRA. We shall present some of the arguments why a consideration of FOCUS phenomena is important for the determination of linear order and for semantic interpretation. We shall proceed, in sections 2 and 3...

The surface form of sentences in Lushootseed is governed primarily by considerations of Communicative Structure, in particular Thematicity. This paper will argue that Thematicity, rather than part of speech, governs the selection of the syntactic predicate in Lushootseed, and will offer some preliminary formal treatments of the phenomenon in terms of ranked constraints governing the transition ...

Cross-language comparison shows that in expressing information packaging—i.e., the structuring of propositional content in function of the speaker’s assumptions about the hearer’s knowledge and attentional state—, different languages exploit word order and prosody in different ways. In other words, one single informational construct is realized by drastically different structural means across l...

One of the characteristics of dialogue translation is that it is strongly dependent on the situation or the communicative goal where the ut terance is spoken. Moreover, the distance between the language pair is great, the possibilities of the transfer diverse and it would be difficult to guarantee the equivalence of translation. In this article, we propose a method of utilizing domain and langu...

In this paper global patterns of thematic text organization me considered within the framework of a distributed model of text understmlding, ttased on file parsing resuhs of prior lext cohesioll analysis, specialized text grammar modules deternfine whether SOllle well-defined text lllltCro organization palteln is cOlll])ulabte flOlll the available text representatiolt SIrUCttlreS. The model und...

Spoken Language can be used to provide insights into organisational processes, unfortunately transcription and coding stages are very time consuming and expensive. The concept of partial transcription and coding is proposed in which spoken language is indexed prior to any subsequent processing. The functional linguistic theory of texture is used to describe the effects of partial transcription ...

No human being can understand every text or dialog in his or her native language, and no one should expect a computer to do so. However, people have a remarkable ability to learn and to extend their understanding without explicit training. Fundamental to human understanding is the ability to learn and use language in social interactions that Wittgenstein called language games. Those language ga...

Scientific researchers, when faced with real world data, try to detect the hidden relations and laws that are not readily apparent. This is the basic motivation for what is called "model building". Several techniques were developed in order to facilitate that work. Statistics provided ways to build efficient models by using the minimal amount of contextual information. Computational intelligenc...

Natural languages have words for all the operators of first-order logic, modal logic, and many logics that have yet to be invented. They also have words and phrases for everything that anyone has ever discovered, assumed, or imagined. Aristotle invented formal logic as a tool (organon) for analyzing and reasoning about the ontologies implicit in language. Yet some linguists and logicians took a...

It is argued that the notion of Umwelt is relevant for contemporary discussions within theoretical biology, biosemiotics, the study of Artificial Life, Autonomous Systems Research and philosophy of biology. Focus is put on the question of whether an artificial creature can have a phenomenal world in the sense of the Umwelt notion of Jakob von Uexküll, one of the founding figures of biosemiotics...