Some recent studies in computat ional l inguist ics have aimed to take advantage of various cues presented by punctuation marks. This short survey is intended to summarise these research efforts and additionally, to outline a current perspect ive for the usage and functions of punctuation marks. We conclude by presenting an information-based f ramework for punctuation, influenced by treatments ...

We present a framework which constructs an event-style discourse semantics. The discourse dynamics are encoded in continuation semantics and various rhetorical relations are embedded in the resulting interpretation of the framework. We assume discourse and sentence are distinct semantic objects, that play different roles in meaning evaluation. Moreover, two sets of composition functions, for ha...

Teenage binge drinking is a significant health issue. To explore teenagers talk about binge drinking, four peer-group interviews were conducted with 20 teenagers, aged 16-18 years, with experience of excessive alcohol use. A discourse analysis showed that a 'drinking is cool' discourse constructed 'getting wasted' as an integral part of social life, while a 'drinking as a social lubricant' disc...

Understanding the policy cycle, as well as scrutinizing the text of hidden and obvious policies and rules, requires a model of discourse analysis based on which discursive ap-proaches of policy makers are understood and estimated. However, when it comes to presenting a policy model, we have to use the views of policy theorists to see how a problem as a "public goods" can be found in the policy ...

We present a compositional, dynamic categorial grammar for discourse analysis that captures the core insights of dynamic semantics: indefinites do not quantify but introduce discourse referents; definites are anaphoric to previously-mentioned discourse referents; discourse referents have their ‘lifespan’ limited by certain operators. The categorial grammar formalism we propose is strongly lexic...

Fuzzy relational identi"cation builds a relational model describing a system's behaviour by a nonlinear mapping between its variables. In this paper, we propose a new fuzzy relational algorithm based on the simpli"ed max}min relational equation. The algorithm presents an adaptation method applied to the gravity-centre of each fuzzy set based on the error integral value between the measured and ...