We propose a formal system for representing the available readings of sentences displaying quan-tifier scope ambiguity, in which partial scopes may be expressed. We show that using a theory of scope availability based upon the function-argument structure of a sentence allows a deter-ministic, polynomial time test for the availability of a reading, while solving the same problem within theories ...

Current Business-to-Business interactions rely on complex exchange of messages. Web Services technologies provide a basis to establish the Web as the ubiquitous technical platform for B2B applications. However, there is a need of formalism for specifying behaviour and verifying certain properties such as well-formedness or deadlock freedom. In this paper, we present a message-exchange pattern b...

The Radical Unacceptability Hypothesis (RUH) has been proposed as a way of explaining the unacceptability extraction from islands and frozen structures. This hypothesis explicitly assumes distinction between due to violations local well-formedness conditions—conditions on constituency, constituent order, morphological form—and extra-grammatical factors. We explore RUH with respect classical isl...

Phonological grammars characterize distinctions between relatively well-formed (unmarked) and relatively ill-formed (marked) phonological structures. We review evidence that markedness influences speech error probabilities. Specifically, although errors result in both unmarked as well as marked structures, there is a markedness asymmetry: errors are more likely to produce unmarked outcomes. We ...

We verify three decision procedures on context-free grammars utilized in a program analyzer for a server-side programming language. One of the procedures decides inclusion between a context-free language and a regular language. The other two decide decision problems related to the well-formedness and validity of XML documents. From its formalization, we generate executable code for a balancedne...

We propose a formal model of Bitcoin transactions, which is sufficiently abstract to enable formal reasoning, and at the same time is concrete enough to serve as an alternative documentation to Bitcoin. We use our model to formally prove some well-formedness properties of the Bitcoin blockchain, for instance that each transaction can only be spent once. We release an open-source tool through wh...

This paper describes the application of xlinkit, a generic tool for managing the consistency of distributed documents, to consistency checking in the context of UML modelling and software development. In particular, we report how we have developed an application of xlinkit to the UML Core package Well-Formedness Rules [9]. We first give an overview of how xlinkit works. We then expand on the sp...

We compare several languages for specifying Markovian population models such as queuing networks and chemical reaction networks. All these languages —matrix descriptions, stochastic Petri nets, stoichiometric equations, stochastic process algebras, and guarded command models— describe continuous-time Markov chains, but they differ according to important properties, such as compositionality, exp...

How the human brain realizes natural language understanding is still an open question. With the development of statistical natural language processing technology, people gradually realized that we should use the possibility to determine whether a sentence is reasonable, which means use the probability to measure the grammatical well-formedness of a sentence. If the probability of the first sent...