Blogs are personal online diaries, and a relatively recent form of computer-mediated communication. What kind of writing do they contain? This paper adopts a measure of linguistic contextuality/formality, due to Heylighen and Dewaele, and applies it to a corpus of weblogs. It first compares the corpus with sub-corpora from the British National Corpus, and weblogs are shown to be more formal tha...

The concept of formality/contextuality is proposed as the most important dimension of variation between linguistic expressions. Formal communication conveys information explicitly, through the linguistic expression itself, whereas contextual communication conveys information implicitly, through the context of the expression. An empirical measure of formality, the F-score, is proposed, based on ...

The ways individuals use words can reflect basic psychological processes, including clues to their thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and personality. This paper seeks to determine whether there is a relationship between Iranian EFL learners' writing styles and their personality and gender.  It focuses on gender and two key dimensions of personality (Neuroticism and Extroversion), which were asse...

Heylighen & Dewaele’s (2002) F-score, a measure of formality developed based on categorical frequencies of word types, is used as a starting point for an investigation of an online diary corpus. Comparisons are made between results in the main corpus of diary entries, a smaller corpus of diary comments, and with previously calculated F-scores for similar types of data (Nowson, Oberlander & Gill...

Contextuality is a key feature of quantum mechanics that provides an important nonclassical resource for quantum information and computation. Abramsky and Brandenburger used sheaf theory to give a general treatment of contextuality in quantum theory [New Journal of Physics 13 (2011) 113036]. However, contextual phenomena are found in other fields as well, for example database theory. In this pa...

The context of a linguistic expression is defined as everything outside the expression itself that is necessary for unambiguous interpretation of the expression. As meaning can be conveyed either by the implicit, shared context or by the explicit form of the expression, the degree of context-dependence or “contextuality” of communication will vary, depending on the situation and preferences of ...

This paper analyzes linguistic variables employed strategically in various instances of political communication to present different levels of intimacy in relation to a continuum between contextuality and formality (Heylighen and Dewaele, 2002) in political talk. Within a given situation, political actors express these choices also in relation to a broader context around their personas: the Mes...

The main topic of this thesis is the study of contextuality, a key characteristic feature of quantum mechanics that represents one of the most valuable resources for quantum computation. We will adopt the sheaf-theoretic approach to non-locality and contextuality introduced in [AB11]. This elegant mathematical theory will enable us to consider contextuality on a higher scale, as a general, abst...

All-vs-Nothing arguments represent a powerful method for the detection of strong contextuality in quantum theory. The original formulation by Mermin [15] has been recently formalised and generalised using stabiliser quantum mechanics [2, 9]. In the present paper, we take advantage of this framework to introduce a computational technique to identify a large amount of strongly contextual empirica...

Samson Abramsky University of Oxford, UK Contextuality and quantum advantage One way of understanding contextuality and its consequences is to see how it can be used to gain advantage in information-processing tasks. We show how quantum resources can be used to gain advantage in games witnessing the fundamental logical and computational concept of homomorphism between relational structures. Thi...