In ‘Fregean Reference Defended’ (1995), Sosa presents a sophisticated descriptive theory of reference, which he calls ‘fregean’, and which he argues avoids standard counterexamples to more basic variants of this approach. What is characteristic of a fregean theory, in his sense, is the idea that what makes a person’s thought about some object, a, a thought about that particular thing, is the fa...

This paper argues that it is possible for suffering to occur in the absence of phenomenal consciousness − in the absence of a certain sort of experiential subjectivity, that is. (‘Phenomenal’ consciousness is the property that some mental states possess, when it is like something to undergo them, or when they have subjective feels, or possess qualia.) So even if theories of phenomenal conscious...

Social media platforms have opened new dimensions within the information retrieval domain leading to a novel concept known as Social Information Retrieval. We argue that the concept of Social Information Retrieval can be extended by augmenting the huge amount of content on the traditional Web with the ever-growing rich Social Web content to increase the information richness of today’s search en...

While there are a number of subjectivity lexicons available for research purposes, none can be used commercially. We describe the process of constructing subjectivity lexicon(s) for recognizing sentiment polarity in essays written by test-takers, to be used within a commercial essay-scoring system. We discuss ways of expanding a manually-built seed lexicon using dictionary-based, distributional...

In this work, we attempt to detect sentencelevel subjectivity by means of two supervised machine learning approaches: a Fuzzy Control System and Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System. Even though these methods are popular in pattern recognition, they have not been thoroughly investigated for subjectivity analysis. We present a novel “Pruned ICF Weighting Coefficient,” which improves the accurac...