In 1978, Gareth Evans published a short and somewhat cryptic
 article purporting to establish that there are no vague objects. This
 paper is commentary on this. Prima facie, the claim there
 objects clearly false. Mt Everest, for example, has no
 precise boundaries. And if this so, must be something wrong
 with Evans' argument. paper, I discuss what is, giving a
 ...

Many fields of application deal with vague and fuzzy information. Thus the need of tools that are able to handle this kind of data is obvious. We concentrate on the extension of well-known terminological knowledge representation systems with appropriate methods. Classical terminological knowledge representation systems are based on two-valued logics. To solve problems of uncertainty a more expr...

Two salient properties of user behavior make Help Desk a unique speech application different from the more general transactional kind: (a) majority of users have only vague ideas about their problem, and (b) these users are likely to contextswitch (change discourse topic) during the course of a dialog. We describe a conversational Help Desk natural language call routing application and show how...

-Current existing service discovery mechanism is lack of dealing with imprecise or vague information of service on semantic level. This paper proposes a novel approach that service advertisements or requests can be expressed in natural language involving linguistic variables, which is considered as an attempt to achieve the vision of soft computing. This new service discovery method has three f...

For bridging the gap between information retrieval (IR) and databases (DB), this article focuses on the logical view. We claim that IR should adopt three major concepts from DB, namely inference, vague predicates and expressive query languages. By regarding IR as uncertain inference, probabilistic versions of relational algebra and Datalog yield very powerful inference mechanisms for IR as well...

A number of problems may arise from architectural requirements modeling, including alignment of it with business strategy, model integration and handling the uncertain and vague information. The paper introduces a method for modeling architectural requirements in a way of ontology-based and capabilityoriented requirements elicitation. The requirements can be modeled within a three-layer framewo...