The semantic discontinuity between World-Wide Web languages, e.g., XML, XML Schema, and XPath, and Semantic Web languages, e.g., RDF, RDFS, and DAML+OIL, forms a serious barrier for the stated goals of the Semantic Web. This discontinuity results from a difference in modeling foundations between XML and logics. We propose to eliminate that discontinuity by creating a common semantic foundation ...

Semantic strategies are a kind of discourse strategy that include the sum of language and cognitive moves which are used to reach an adequate goal of communication normally resulting in text comprehension by the reader or listener. Here, the language user takes a number of steps in order to perform a complex task. Semantic strategies in prejudiced talk have been examined extensively in western ...

This paper reviews state-of-the-art of one emerging field in computational linguistics — semantic change computation, proposing a framework that summarizes the literature by identifying and expounding five essential components in the field: diachronic corpus, diachronic word sense characterization, change modelling, evaluation data and data visualization. Despite the potential of the field, the...

What is the difference between description and explanation in linguistics? We take explanation to be the reduction of description to independently motivated general principles. For language, a promising source of independently motivated general principles can be found in neuroscience, and especially computational neuroscience. As an example, we consider the notion of historical change in word m...

A growing body of literature shows that endowing a mobile robot with semantic knowledge, and with the ability to reason from this knowledge, can greatly increase its capabilities. In this paper, we explore a novel use of semantic knowledge: we encode information about how things should be, or norms, to allow the robot to infer deviations from these norms and to generate goals to correct these d...

Change-impact analysis (CIA) is the task of determining the set of program elements impacted by a program change. Precise CIA has great potential to avoid expensive testing and code reviews for (parts of) changes that are refactorings (semantics-preserving). Existing CIA is imprecise because it is coarse-grained, deals with only few refactoring patterns, or is unaware of the change semantics. W...

I propose four stages in a semantic bleaching process of the Chinese numeral nominal phrase, da-NumP. This division of stages is based on the chronological order in which the first attested examples of each stage arise. The first stage is a lexical use, in which the morpheme da is a lexical modifier denoting the property of bigness. In the second stage, da loses its lexical status and functions...