This article reports and analyses the method and findings from a 3-year interdisciplinary project investigating how the medium of law can support understanding of socio-scientific issues. Law represents one of the most important means by which society decides and communicates its values. Activities mirroring legal processes therefore have significant potential to inform, inspire and involve sch...

We describe a procedure for contextual interpretation of spoken sentences within dialogs. Task structure is represented in a graphical form, enabling the interpreter algorithm to be efficient and task-independent. Recognized spoken input may consist either of a single sentence with utterance-verification scores, or of a word lattice with arc weights. A confidence model is used throughout and al...

This paper describes the AUTOSEM syntactic framework for semantic interpretation and the CARMEL robust understanding engine in which it operates. This work has been developed as part of an effort to build tools for authoring broad coverage natural language understanding interfaces for intelligent tutoring systems. Its purpose is to provide a solid foundation for interpretation that will facilit...

The idea of Communitarianism with epistemic teachings, such as politics as virtue, the priority of good faith, respect for the cultural diversity of societies, is one of the most prominent intellectual currents of the present age. The hypothesis of this research is that based on the comparative analytical attitude of key societal teachings and the epistemic principles of Islam, one can find com...

One of the most difficult parts of the natural language understanding process is forming a semantic interpretation of the text. A reader must often make multiple inferences to understand the motives of actors and to causally connect actions that are unrelated on the basis of surface semantics alone. The inference process is complicated by the fact that text is often ambiguous both lexically and...