We introduce the notions of blocked, block-marked and block-deterministic regular expressions. We characterize block-deterministic regular expressions with determin-istic Glushkov block automata. The results can be viewed as a generalization of the characterization of one-unambiguous regular expressions with deterministic Glushkov automata. In addition, when a language L has a block-determinist...

A corporate social responsibility (CSR) report is a form of information disclosure about environmental, health, and human rights issues. It serves as an essential bridge for communication between enterprises stakeholders. Enterprises can use vague language (VL) to strategically communicate with the public, establish positive image, legitimize their activities. In recent years, many scholars hav...

Natural language requests involving vague spatial concepts are not easily communicated to a GIS because the meaning of spatial concepts depends largely on the contexts (such as task, spatial contexts, and user’s personal background) that may or may not be available or specified in the system. To address such problems, we developed a collaborative dialogue approach that enables the system and th...

While qualitative relations (e.g. RCC8 relations) can readily be derived from spatial databases, a more difficult matter is the representation of vague spatial relations such as ‘near-to’,‘next-to’, ‘between’, etc. After surveying earlier approaches, this paper proposes a method that is tractable, learnable and directly suitable for use in natural language interfaces to spatial databases. The a...

Patients often quote diseases or illnesses that either do not exist per se or are hard to prove that they exist. Often symptoms are vague and, therefore, difficult for patients to qualify in a language clinicians can understand, interpret and act upon. Physicians often perpetuate this by giving 'diagnoses of exclusion', or using poor explanations, oversimplifications, conflicting diagnostic cri...