1) Out corpus of descriptive text contains a significant number of long-distance pronominal references (8.4% of the total). In order to account for how these pronouns are interpreted, we re-examine Grosz and Sidner's theory of the attentional state, and in particular the use of the global focus to supplement centering theory. Our corpus evidence concerning these long-distance pronominal referen...

In assessments of the seismic adequacy of existing steel bridges, the anchorage of steel truss piers to their foundations often has insufficient strength to resist seismic demands. Many other non-ductile failure locations may also exist along the seismic load path that cannot provide adequate seismic performance. Although strengthening is an option, this approach may only transfer damage to ano...

Introduction Karaism, a messianic Jewish movement founded in the Middle Ages, sought to redefine Jewish religious practice by re-centering it on the “Written Law” (i.e., the Hebrew Bible) in its entirety, and rejecting the “Oral Law” as codified in the Mishnah and Talmud. The Karaites also reversed the structure of the traditional Jewish canon, placing biblical study and the sub-disciplines rel...

The basic concepts in Centering Theory, such as utterance, ranking and R1-pronouns, are purposely left unspecified to concrete tasks. The proper setting of these parameters in Chinese anaphoric resolution is examined in this study. Six resolution algorithms are designed to examine the effectiveness of the instantiations of different parametric settings. The results reveal that utterances, when ...

Centering, positioning an object within specified bounds, is a common computer task, for example making selections using a touch screen or positioning icons relative to each other. The experiments measured times for participants (n = 155) to position a circular cursor with diameter, p = 40 pixel or approximately 10 mm, completely within circular targets with a variety of diameters, w. The analy...

One of the necessary extensions to the centering model is a mechanism to handle pronouns with intrasentential antecedents. Existing centering models deal only with discourses consisting of simple sentences. It leaves unclear how to delimit center-updating utterance units and how to process complex utterances consisting of multiple clauses. In this paper, I will explore the extent to which a str...

The centering inference p & q, therefore if p then q is important in reasoning research because it is logically valid for some accounts of conditionals (e. g. the material and the probability conditionals), but not for others (e. g. the inferential conditional, according to which a conditional is true if and only if there is an inferential connection between p and q). We tested participants' ac...

A new application of the mean centering of ratio spectra method is proposed for estimation of the rate constants of second order reactions, using kinetic-spectrophotometric data. The method is based on the mean centering of the ratio spectra to obtain a kinetic profile of the product. Using computational fitting, the rate constant can be obtained without any ambiguity. An interesting feature of...

The entries of high-dimensional measurements, such as image or feature descriptors, are often correlated, which leads to a bias in similarity estimation. To remove the correlation, a linear transformation, called whitening, is commonly used. In this work, we analyze robust estimation of the whitening transformation in the presence of outliers. Inspired by the Iteratively Re-weighted Least Squar...

This paper introduces novel numerical solution strategies for generalized semi-infinite optimization problems (GSIP), a class of mathematical optimization problems which occur naturally in the context of design centering problems, robust optimization problems, and many fields of engineering science. GSIPs can be regarded as bilevel optimization problems, where a parametric lower-level maximizat...