Abstract Generic sentences involving phrasal conjunctions present a prima facie problem for the standard theory of generics according to which they express quasi-universal generalisations about what is characteristic members particular kind. For example, sentence ‘Elephants live in Africa and Asia’ true, even though it uncharacteristic an elephant both Asia. In response this problem, theorists ...

I N T R O D U C T I O N Identification of the appropriate conjuncts of the coordinate conjunctions in a sentence is fundamental to the understanding of the sentence. We use the phrase 'conjunct identification' to refer to the process of identifying the components (words, phrases, clauses) in a sentence that are conjoined by the coordinate conjunctions in it. Consider the following sentence: "Th...

While ∧,∨,¬ form a complete set of connectives for classical propositional logic, this does not hold for Łukasiewicz’s three-valued propositional logic, nor its generalization to n-valued logic. We define a unary connective r so that ∧,∨,¬, r form a complete set of connectives for n-valued Łukasiewicz logic. We discuss generalizations of this to infinitary logics. If we allow infinite conjuncti...

Traditional approaches to semantics give a logical, settheoretic account of category conjunction, where an item is a member of a conjunction A&B only if it is a member of both single categories A and B. However, people do not always follow this logical approach when classifying items in conjunctions. For example, Hampton (1988) found that people typically classify blackboards as non-members of ...

In English text, independent clauses should be demarcated with full-stops (periods), or linked together with conjunctions. Non-native speakers are often prone to linking them improperly with commas instead of conjunctions, producing comma splices. This paper describes a method to detect comma splices using Conditional Random Fields (CRF), with features derived from parse tree patterns. In exper...

We present average case models of algorithms for learning Conjunctive Normal Form (CNF, i.e., conjunctions of disjunctions) and Disjunctive Normal Form (DNF, i.e., disjunctions of conjunctions). Our goal is to predict the expected error of the learning algorithm as a function of the number n of training examples, averaging over all sequences of n training examples. We show that our average case...