Theories of explanation seek to tell us what distinctively explanatory information is. The most ambitious ones, such as the DN-account, seek to tell us what an explanation is, tout court. Less ambitious ones, such as causal theories, restrict themselves to a particular domain of inquiry. The least ambitious theories constitute outright skepticism, holding that there is no reasonably unified phe...

In Japanese, there are a large number of notational variants of words. This is because Japanese words are written in three kinds of characters: kanji (Chinese) characters, hiragara letters, and katakana letters. Japanese students study basic rules of Japanese writing in school for many years. However, it is difficult to learn which variant is suitable for a certain context in official, business...

We present our system used in the DUC 2007 update task, which is our first entry in any of the DUC evaluations. We make use of ideas within our existing FreqDistSumm text summarizer, which has been shown to perform well in biomedical text summarization. Our system submitted to the DUC Update Task, called FreqDistUpdate, uses a context sensitive approach to scoring sentences based on a frequency...

In this paper, we introduce a robust controller that uses contact position and normal feedback to generate contact conngurations for statically stable grasps. The approach uses a context sensitive composition of two controllers that minimize force and moment residuals in the grasp connguration. We show that equilibria in the composite controller correspond to optimal contact conngurations for 2...

For modeling and analyzing regulatory networks based on qualitative information and possibly additional temporal constraints, approaches using hybrid automata can be very helpful. The formalism focussed on in this paper starts from the logical description developed by R. Thomas to capture network structure and qualitative behavior of a system. Using the framework of timed automata, the analysis...

Theories of explanation seek to tell us what distinctively explanatory information is. The most ambitious ones, such as the DN-account, seek to tell us what an explanation is, tout court. Less ambitious ones, such as causal theories, restrict themselves to a particular domain of inquiry. The least ambitious theories constitute outright skepticism, holding that there is no reasonably unified phe...

Two complexity results are shown for the output languages generated by compositions of macro tree transducers. They are in NSPACE(n) and hence are context-sensitive, and the class is NP-complete.

Abstract. Vagueness is blamed for the Sorites Paradox. But the nature of vagueness is not well understood. Initially characterizing vagueness in terms of Sainsbury’s boundary metaphor, I argue that all semantic theories failing to do justice to this boundary metaphor are false. However, it is unclear what kind of semantic theory of vagueness is immune to this charge. I explore the boundary meta...

Epistemic contextualists think that the extension of the expression ‘knows’ (and its cognates) depends on and varies with the context of utterance. In the last 15 years or so this view has faced intense criticism. This paper focuses on two sorts of objections. The first are what I call the ‘linguistic objections’, which purport to show that the best available linguistic evidence suggests that ‘...

Automatic generation of models from a set of positive and negative samples and a-priori knowledge (if available) is a crucial issue for pattern recognition applications. Grammatical inference can play an important role in this issue since it can be used to generate the set of model classes, where each class consists on the rules to generate the models. In this paper we present the process of le...