The paper investigates the characterisation of vague concepts within the framework of modal logic. This work builds on the su-pervaluation approach of Fine and exploits the idea of a precisiication space. A simple language is presented with two modalities: a necessity operator and an operatorìt is unequivocal that' which is used to articulate the logic of vagueness. Both these operators obey th...

Vagueness is an extremely common feature of natural language, but does it actually play a positive, efficiency enhancing, role in communication? Adopting a probabilistic interpretation of vague terms, we propose that vagueness might act as a source of randomness when deciding what to assert. In this context we investigate the efficacy of multiple sender channels in which senders choose assertio...

Vernacular regions such as central Ohio are popularly used in everyday language; but their vague and indeterministic boundaries affect the clarity of communicating them over the geographic space. This paper introduced a context-based natural language processing approach to retrieve geographic entities. Geographic entities extracted from news articles were used as location-based behavioral sampl...

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 ...

In many geographical applications there is a need to model spatial phenomena not simply by sharp objects but rather through indeterminate or vague concepts. To support such applications we present a model of vague regions which covers and extends previous approaches. The formal framework is based on a general exact model of spatial data types. On the one hand, this simplifies the definition of ...

We present a new query language for information retrieval in XML documents and discuss its combination with information extraction methods. XIRQL is an XML query language which implements IR-related features such as weighting and ranking, relevance-oriented search, datatypes with vague predicates, and structural relativism. For information extracted from texts, XIRQL can rank records based on u...

The ambiguity and vagueness of natural language vocabulary is one of the biggest obstacles to formalising reasoning systems that can operate with natural language concepts. The paper presents a formal theory of the logic of vague adjectives, which is based on two key ideas: 1) a sharp distinction between count noun concepts and adjectival concepts is build into both syntax and semantics; 2) val...

Vagueness is a fundamental, pervasive, and characteristic feature of natural language meaning. Almost every predicate whose applicability depends on gradient properties—which includes most content words in every language—exhibits vague uncertainty in borderline cases. The Sorities Paradox (the Paradox of the Heap) is the hallmark of vagueness: how can infitessimal differences add up to a qualit...