The knock-down, mortality and 'irritancy' effects of three synthetic repellents (DEET, IR3535 and KBR 3023) on Aedes aegypti (L) (Diptera: Culicidae) were evaluated in the laboratory in the absence of animal bait. Filter paper tests were carried out to assess the knock-down effect (KDt(50) and KDt(95)) and mortality (LC(50) and LC(95)) induced by each repellent. 'Irritancy' tests were carried o...

Recently, vector-borne diseases have been resurging in endemic areas and expanding their geographic range into nonendemic areas. Such changes have refocused attention to the potential for major public health events, as naive populations are exposed to these pathogens. Personal topical repellents, recommended by the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and World Health Organi...

The difficulty of a user query can affect the performance of Information Retrieval (IR) systems. This work presents a formal model for quantifying and reasoning about query difficulty as follows: Query difficulty is considered to be a subjective belief, which is formulated on the basis of various types of evidence. This allows us to define a belief model and a set of operators for combining evi...

1998-1999 school year poses the question of how the United States should change its foreign policy toward Russia. Although debate about foreign policy has been relegated to a back-seat compared to domestic issues by the American public, the academic community in international relations (IR) has been energized by the end of the Cold War. The Russia topic will provide a challenging opportunity fo...

We. present a study of the mappings from semantic content to syntactic expression with the aim of isolating the precise locus and role of pragmatic information in the generation process, l~om a corpus of English, French, and Portuguese instructions for consumer products, we demonstrate the range of expressions of two semantic relations, GENEI~ATION and ENABLEMENT (Goldman, 1970) in each languag...

We present an approach to dialogue management and interpretation that evaluates and selects amongst candidate dialogue moves based on features at multiple levels. Multiple interpretation methods can be combined, multiple speech recognition and parsing hypotheses tested, and multiple candidate dialogue moves considered to choose the highest scoring hypothesis overall. We integrate hypotheses gen...

Previous natural language help systems have not taken into account the user’s knowledge when formulating answers. Such pragmatic information is needed to formulate more concise and helpful answers. By not repeating things that the user already knows, a system can provide more succinct answers that, because they focus on pertinent new facts, are easier to understand. A users’s prior knowledge al...

In any well-written mathematical discourse a certain amount of mathematical and meta-mathematical knowledge is presupposed and implied. We give an account on presuppositions and implicatures in mathematical discourse and describe an architecture that allows to effectively interpret them. Our approach heavily relies on proof methods that capture common patterns of argumentation in mathematical d...

this study investigated the effectiveness of explicit pragmatic instruction on the acquisition of requests by college-level english as foreign language (efl) learners in taiwan. the goal was to determine first whether the use of explicit pragmatic instruction had a positive effect on efl learners’ pragmatic competence. second, the relative effectiveness of presenting pragmatics through two deli...