1 Truth-relativism For our purposes, truth-relativism can be characterised as the doctrine that in a single world the very same token utterance can take different truth-values when considered in different contexts of assessment. The root semantic idea is already present in Lewis’s 1980, where an utterance of a sentence like “It is raining” is conceived as receiving a truth-value only when the v...

A widely used method for finding places to take turn in spoken dialogue systems is to assume that an utterance ends where the user ceases to speak. Such endpoint detection normally triggers on a certain amount of silence, or non-speech. However, spontaneous speech frequently contains silent pauses inside sentence-like units, for example when the speaker hesitates. This paper presents /nailon/, ...

As an Islamo-Arabic utterance,throughout the history of Islam, “Allahu Akbar” has been widely used as one of the most influential religious slogans since the advent of Islam in the 7th century CE. However, during the last four decades, it has gained a fairly global reputation thanks to various functions it has pragmatically come to serve in different social settings. Recentl...

This paper presents an approach for automatically learning reference resolution, which involves using natural language expressions, including spatial language descriptions, to refer to an object in a context. This is useful in conversational systems that need to understand the context of an utterance, like multi-modal or embodied dialogue systems. Markov Logic Networks are explored as a way of ...