Systems for general intelligence require a significant potential to model a variety of different cognitive abilities. It is often claimed that logic-based systems – although rather successful for modeling specialized tasks – lack the ability to be useful as a universal modeling framework due to the fact that particular logics can often be used only for special purposes (and do not cover the who...

In the global debates on English as international lingua franca or as ‘killer language’, the adoption of English as medium of instruction in Higher Education is raising increasing concern. Plurilingualism and multilingualism are embedded in the official policies of the European Union and Council of Europe, and the Bologna Process for harmonizing Higher Education promises ‘proper provision for l...

Academic writing, including in English as an Academic Lingua Franca, has become a central feature for the majority of European university students. Despite a large body of research, we find that conceptualisations of student writing still tend to assume a direct link to expert academic genres, which are often explicitly evoked as models. Within a genre analytic paradigm, however, the importance...

BACKGROUND There is a growing interest in beef cattle breeding in Sweden. The majority of the females are bred naturally, which is why it is important to choose healthy fertile bulls to obtain good reproduction and profitability. The breeding soundness evaluation includes measurement of scrotal circumference (SC). Our aim was to analyze if the SC of performance tested beef bulls has changed ove...

he Cortegiano rejects one major aspect of the Renaissance reinterpretation of Boccaccio’s Decameron. It cannot consider the text as a model for literary Italian in the way that Bembo urged his readers do so in the Prose della volgar lingua. For Castiglione this attempt to make the Decameron a timeless, linguistic archetype was misguided and inappropriate to the needs of contemporary court socie...

There is a tendency to think of World Englishes in the noun form; as products rather than as processes (implying that one receives both ready-made, controlling the development of neither). Conceptualising World Englishes as processes in which one can participate as an agent raises the question of what skills are needed in their active construction. The author will argue that since culture resid...

Psycholinguistic and stochastic grammatical theories of sound structure are typically stated in quite different formal vocabularies (i.e., connectionist networks vs. stochastic extensions of Optimality Theory). This commentary argues that this difference obscures a common set of core principles: in each framework, the generation of behavior can be conceptualized as the consequence of the intera...

I begin by discussing the use of pattern languages as lingua franca for supporting communication among the diverse parties to the design process. Next, I describe an example of the emergence of a lingua franca during the process of re-designing a small town, and the ways in which it enabled the community to shape its own future. I conclude by suggesting that pattern languages which describe a w...

English. This report describes the EVENTI (EValuation of Events aNd Temporal Information) task organized within the EVALITA 2014 evaluation campaign. The EVENTI task aims at evaluating the performance of Temporal Information Processing systems on a corpus of Italian news articles. Motivations for the task, datasets, evaluation metrics, and results obtained by participating systems are presented...

An approach is presented for the management of knowledge gained during the development of pharmaceutical processes. The “Toolbox” approach risk-manages resource commitments during process development by ensuring that knowledge of processing characteristics increases in-line with increasing product maturity. The “Toolboxes” provide an introduction to the basic principles for the novice. This is ...