An important part of explaining how people communicate is to understand how people relate language to entities in the world. In describing measurements, people prefer to use qualitative words like ‘tall’ without precise applicability conditions, also known as vague words. The use of vague language varies widely across contexts, individuals, and tasks (single reference vs. comparisons between ta...

Disagreeing with Williamson on vagueness, the author proposes a solution that he calls “three-valued plurivaluationism” to the age-old sorites paradox. In essence, it is a three-valued semantics for a first-order language with identity with the additional suggestion that a vague language has more than one correct interpretation. Unlike the traditional three-valued approach to a vague language, ...

In the area of computer science focusing on creating machines that can engage on behaviors that humans consider intelligent. The ability to create intelligent machines has intrigued humans since ancient times and today with the advent of the computer and 50 years of research into various programming techniques, the dream of smart machines is becoming a reality. Researchers are creating systems ...

Many knowledge-based systems need to represent vague concepts. Although the practical approach of representing vague concepts as precise intervals over numbers is well-accepted in AI, there is no systematic method to delimit the boundaries of intervals, only ad hoc methods. We present a framework to reason precisely with vague concepts based on the observation that the vague concepts and their ...

This paper analyzes communication with a language that is vague in the sense that identical messages do not always result in identical interpretations. It is shown that strategic agents frequently add to this vagueness by being intentionally vague, i.e. they deliberately choose less precise messages than they have to among the ones available to them in equilibrium. Having to communicate with a ...

Vague predicates, those that exhibit borderline cases, pose a persistent problem for philosophers and logicians. Although they are ubiquitous in natural language, when used in a logical context, vague predicates lead to contradiction. This paper will address a question that is intimately related to this problem. Given their inherent imprecision, why do vague predicates arise in the first place?...

Natural language is one of the primary means of communicating spatial information, but existing geographic information retrieval (GIR) facilities are weak in this respect. One of the major challenges in automated interpetation of spatial natural language is how to model the regions implied by spatial expressions. This paper presents a field-based model for representing the vague regions defined...

A framework for rapid development of conversational natural language call routing systems is proposed. The framework cuts costs by using only scantily prepared business requirements to automatically create an initial prototype. Besides clear targets (terminal routing classes), vague targets which are variations of users’ incomplete (semantically overlapping) sentences are enumerated. The vague ...