We. present a study of the mappings from semantic content to syntactic expression with the aim of isolating the precise locus and role of pragmatic information in the generation process, l~om a corpus of English, French, and Portuguese instructions for consumer products, we demonstrate the range of expressions of two semantic relations, GENEI~ATION and ENABLEMENT (Goldman, 1970) in each languag...

We present an approach to dialogue management and interpretation that evaluates and selects amongst candidate dialogue moves based on features at multiple levels. Multiple interpretation methods can be combined, multiple speech recognition and parsing hypotheses tested, and multiple candidate dialogue moves considered to choose the highest scoring hypothesis overall. We integrate hypotheses gen...

Previous natural language help systems have not taken into account the user’s knowledge when formulating answers. Such pragmatic information is needed to formulate more concise and helpful answers. By not repeating things that the user already knows, a system can provide more succinct answers that, because they focus on pertinent new facts, are easier to understand. A users’s prior knowledge al...

In any well-written mathematical discourse a certain amount of mathematical and meta-mathematical knowledge is presupposed and implied. We give an account on presuppositions and implicatures in mathematical discourse and describe an architecture that allows to effectively interpret them. Our approach heavily relies on proof methods that capture common patterns of argumentation in mathematical d...

UNLABELLED Knowledge translation (KT) involves implementation of evidence-based strategies and guidelines into practice to improve the process of care and health outcomes for patients. Findings from pragmatic trials may be used in KT to provide patients, healthcare providers and policymakers with information to optimize healthcare decisions based on how a given strategy or intervention performs...

Pragmatic clinical trials (PCTs) seek to improve the generalizability and increase the statistical power of traditional explanatory trials. They are a major tenet of comparative effectiveness research. While a powerful study design, PCTs have been limited by high cost, modest efficiency, and limited ability to fill relevant evidence gaps. Based on an American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (ARRA...

Meanings of basic expressions can be enriched by considering what the speaker could have said, but chose not to, that is, the alternatives. We report three experiments testing whether there is a single enrichment procedure that stretches across diverse linguistic phenomena. Participants were primed to understand either the basic meaning or the enriched meaning of a sentence. We found that the e...

Objectives: Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) have problems in communicating and social interaction skills. Moreover, deficits in pragmatic language and executive functions are among the most important causes of communication and social interaction problems in this group. The present study aimed to determine the relationship between executive functioning and two of its indices (behav...