In this paper, we present a new framework to analyze firewall policy by using argumentation. At the core of this new idea is extending firewall rules with the concept of “reasons” and arguing about the reasons, not the rules. Depending on how the reasons are designed, the resulting framework can be useful in a number of ways: new anomalies in a firewall policy can be identified while, at the sa...

In discourse processing, two major problems are understanding the underlying connections between succe~ive dialog utterances and deciding on the content of a coherent dialog response. Thin paper presents a computational model of these tasks for a restricted class of argumentative dialogs. In these dialogs, each response presents a belief that justifies or contradicts another belief presented or...

This paper lays out the components of a language acquisition model, the interconnections among the components, and the differing stances of nativism and empiricism about syntax. After demonstrating that parsimony cannot decide between the two stances, the paper analyzes nine examples of evidence that have been used to argue for or against nativism, concluding that most pieces of evidence are ei...