We describe our efforts to apply the Penn Discourse Treebank guidelines on a Tamil corpus to create an annotated corpus of discourse relations in Tamil. After conducting a preliminary exploratory study on Tamil discourse connectives, we show our observations and results of a pilot experiment that we conducted by annotating a small portion of our corpus. Our ultimate goal is to develop a Tamil D...

There are two conceivable readings for (1). Either (a) it refers to the party or (b) Peter only disliked the food. Discourse grammars like Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT) offer an explanation for this phenomenon. SDRT an extension ofDRT (Kamp and Reyle, 1993) describes a complex propositional structure of Discourse Representation Structures (DRSs) connected via discourse relati...

The goal of this study was to determine whether variability in working memory (WM) capacity and cognitive control affects the processing of global discourse congruence and local associations among words when participants listened to short discourse passages. The final, critical word of each passage was either associated or unassociated with a preceding prime word (e.g., "He was not prepared for...

In this paper we propose a computational treatment of the resolution of zero pronouns in Japanese discourse, using an adaptation of the centering algorithm. We are able to factor language-specific dependencies into one parameter of the centering algorithm. Previous analyses have stipulated that a zero pronoun and its cospecifier must share a grammatical function property such as Subject or NonS...

Quantifiers are ubiquitous in natural language and, in addition to providing information about quantity, they serve important discourse functions. We outline several theoretical accounts of the functions that quantifiers perform in a discourse and the factors governing their interpretation, focusing on two specific topics that have received substantial attention from researchers working in ling...

Fuzzy sets are naturally ordered by the subsethood relation A ⊆ B. If we only know which set which fuzzy set is a subset of which – and have no access to the actual values of the corresponding membership functions – can we detect which fuzzy sets are crisp? In this paper, we show that this is indeed possible. We also show that if we start with interval-valued fuzzy sets, then we can similarly d...

This paper is, basically, a reflection on modeling, starting by asking what happens when the meaning of a predicate P is interpreted by the membership function of a fuzzy set that, labeled P , is designed with the information available to the designer on the use of the predicate in the corresponding universe of discourse. In it, the modification of the meaning that P can suffer by its identific...

Bresnan (1994), based on data in English and Chicheŵa, proposes that the discourse function of locative inversion construction (LIC) is presentational focus, in which the referent of the NP ‘is introduced or reintroduced on the (part of the) scene referred to by the preposed locative’. Pan (1996) suggests that the discourse function of LIC in Chinese is the same. In this paper, I investigate tw...

Article Outline Glossary I. Definition of the Subject and Its Importance II. Introduction III. Mathematical modeling of imprecise data IV. Fuzzy random variables V. Statistical analysis of random fuzzy perceptions VI.1 Fuzzy estimators and fuzzy confidence intervals VI.2 Fuzzy statistical tests VII. Statistical analysis of random fuzzy variables VIII. Future directions Bibliography Glossary Fuz...