Ambiguity and vagueness in clinical practice guidelines reduce the likelihood of clinician adherence. They lead to inconsistent interpretation and, in turn, to inappropriate practice variation and medical errors. Resolving ambiguity and vagueness is an essential step in the computerized implementation of clinical practice guidelines. Successful resolution of ambiguity and vagueness requires an ...

One increasingly fruitful paradigm for studying language in context considers the utility of communication relative to the goals of the conversational participants. In order to make this approach relatively concrete, I shall consider a scenario in which two agents a empt to schedule a meeting, using vague temporal expressions such as early in the morning. Vague expressions are not necessary, of...

This paper presents an expressive language for representing knowledge about vague concepts. It is based on the rough set formalism and it caters for implicit definition of rough relations by combining different regions (e.g. upper approximation, lower approximation, boundary) of other rough relations. The semantics of the proposed language is obtained by translating it to the language of extend...

Grice’s maxims are hopelessly vague, and in fact harmful, because they form a misleading taxonomy. While his cooperative principle may be useful at a high level of theoretical analysis, it too is vague, and should not be directly implemented in computational natural language systems. Answers are suggested to a number of this symposium’s topics based on this position. Examples are presented to s...

Knowledge Base Systems should in principle be able to store and manipulate any sort of knowledge, including vague (indefinite) knowledge, knowledge about events and obligations and knowledge about temporal aspects. In this paper a language, CPL, is introduced in which all these different kinds of knowledge can be expressed. This language is based on the linguistic theory of Functional Grammar. ...

This article examines the role of gradable properties in referring expressions from the perspective of natural language generation. First, we propose a simple semantic analysis of vague descriptions (i.e., referring expressions that contain gradable adjectives) that reflects the contextdependent meaning of the adjectives in them. Second, we show how this type of analysis can inform algorithms f...

Ontologies have been employed in several applications regarding knowledge representation, aiming to represent data semantics and support reasoning tasks. However, traditional ontologies are less suitable to represent some domains that require the representation of vague or imprecise information, which often occurs in human language. In order to handle such restriction, it is necessary to extend...

Ontologies can be a powerful tool for structuring knowledge, and they are currently the subject of extensive research. Updating the contents of an ontology or improving its interoperability with other ontologies is an important but difficult process. In this paper, we focus on the presence of vague concepts, which are pervasive in natural language, within the framework of formal ontologies. We ...

In real applications, information is often imprecise and vague. Exact information has become an essential part of modern database applications for making next generation information systems more human friendly. Fuzzy techniques have been widely used to represent such vague information in various database models and theories. Because of the efficiency of object oriented databases in handling com...

The paper continues the study of union-free and deterministic union-free languages. In contrast with the fact that every regular language can be described as a finite union of union-free languages, we show that the finite unions of deterministic union-free languages define a proper subfamily of regular languages. Then we examine the properties of this subfamily.