Apun is a form of wordplay in which aword suggests two or more meanings by exploiting polysemy, homonymy, or phonological similarity to another word, for an intended humorous or rhetorical effect. Though a recurrent and expected feature in many discourse types, puns stymie traditional approaches to computational lexical semantics because they violate their one-sense-percontext assumption. This ...

The paper [Tarski:Les fondements de la géométrie des corps,Annales de la Société Polonaise de Mathématiques, pp. 29–34, 1929] is in many ways remarkable. We address three historico-philosophical issues that force themselves upon the reader. First we argue that in this paper Tarski did not live up to his own methodological ideals, but displayed instead a much more pragmatic approach. Second we s...

Discourse comprises those phenomena that usually do not arise when processing a single sentence . It appears to be the most difficult and probably the least understood aspect of automated message understanding. Five out of fifteen sites on a MUC-3 survey listed discourse as their main weakness and an area in which t o concentrate future research . Virtually all systems presented here take a sen...

Bakhtin's tendency to continually recommence his research is what Todorov calls "repetition": "un ressassement eternellement recommencé" (1981: 25). Bakhtin's work, says Todorov, does not know development in the true sense of the word: the centre of interest and formulation changes, but despite certain changes and shifts (even if they are hardly perceptible), Bakhtin's discourse continually ret...

Previous research has shown that questioning is a key strategy that facilitators use to promote discussion in Problem-Based Learning (PBL). Yet, there is a lack of detailed understanding on what questions facilitators ask and how those questions affect discussion. In this study we examined different types of questions that experienced facilitators asked to promote discussion of teaching problem...

In this paper we analyze the social and historical construction process of marketing, and how it is inherently linked to the reproduction of capitalism in times of crisis. Based on Foucauldian discourse theory, we critically interrogate marketing’s discursive change from a productionand sales-led to a consumption-led paradigm in the 1960s and 1970s. We use Lacan’s (1977, 1998) theory of individ...

This paper focuses on the interpretation of metaphor in discourse. We build on previous work (Agerri, Barnden, Lee, & Wallington, 2007) to offer a formalization in a computationally-oriented formal semantic framework of a set of mappings that we claim are required for the interpretation of map-transcending metaphor. Such mappings are domain-independent and are identified as invariant adjuncts t...

Classical constraint systems require that the set of variables which exist in a problem be known ab initio. However, there are some applications in which the existence of certain variables is dependent on conditions whose truth or falsity can only be determined dynamically. In this paper, we show how this conditional existence of variables can be handled in a mathematically well-founded fashion...