This paper presents an open-domain textual Question-Answering system that uses several feedback loops to enhance its performance. These feedback loops combine in a new way statistical results with syntactic, semantic or pragmatic information derived from texts and lexical databases. The paper presents the contribution of each feedback loop to the overall performance of 76% human-assessed precis...

Psychokinesis research is encountering difficulties in replicating its findings. While experimental and analysis methods became more and more professional in the last decades, researchers complain about a loss of effect size and evidence. Walter von Lucadou explained this erosion of evidence with his “Model of Pragmatic Information” (MPI). He proposed a new experimental paradigm for future rese...

Siegal (e.g. 1991, Siegal & Peterson, 1994) has long argued that data from conversations with young children in experimental settings must be treated with caution. If the child does not understand and share the experimenter's purpose he or she may provide irrelevant responses ± irrelevant, that is, to the scientific endeavour of determining what the child knows. This is a valid methodological p...

the present investigation was designed to study the production and comprehension of specific means for information highlighted by advanced iranian learners of english as a foreign language. the study focused on the discourse-pragmatically motivated variations of the basic word order such as inversion, pre-posing, it- and wh-clefts. after taking the nelson test, a homogeneous group was settled. ...

To date, little research on pragmatic transfer has considered a multilingual situation where there is an interaction among three different languages spoken by one person. Of interest was whether pragmatic transfer of refusals among three languages spoken by the same person occurs from L1 and L2 to L3, L1 to L2 and then to L3 or from L1 and L1 (if there are more than one L1) to L2. This study ai...