Thursday, June 28
Kit Fine (2017) distinguishes between exact truthmaking, which requires that every part of the truthmaker be relevant to making the sentence true, and inexact truthmaking, which lacks this requirement (and is akin to situation semanticists’ notion of (persistent) verification). He argues that because we can define the latter in terms of the former, but not vice versa, we should take exact truthmaking to be the fundamental notion. But I argue this this gets things backwards: inexact truthmaking can be used to define exact truthmaking, but not vice versa. Truthmaker semantics should be built on a foundation of inexact truthmaking.
This study aims to analyze the use of 30 common English acronyms in Chinese text/speech, using several newspaper corpora and Google books to represent text and TV/radio corpora to represent speech. We first use the percentage of English acronyms (prctEn) to measure the degree of acronym usage. prctEn is defined as the frequency of English acronyms over the summed frequency of its English and Chinese terms: prctEn (GDP) = count(GDP) / count(GDP+国内生产总值, guomin shengchan zongzhi, literal translation of "Gross Domestic Product"). The result first shows an increasing trend for prctEn diachronically. Several factors (frequency of the concept, length of Chinese translation, etc.) are predicted to <chrome_find class="find_in_page findysel">influence prctEn of a given acronym in the linear mixed-effects model. The length of the Chinese translation is the single most important reason for which speakers would prefer the English acronym over its Chinese translation, i.e. the shorter the better.
In modal logic, modal expressions can be classified according to their quantificational force (i.e. must and may). Also, among necessity modals, there exists a strength distinction (e.g. must and should). This poster entertains a possibility laid down by these two parameters. In particular, in Chinese, the dual counterpart of should and a logically stronger version of may are realized as you-liyou 'have-reason’, the semantics of which can be naturally captured under Kratzerian approach to modality.
No description.
Constraint answer set programming (CASP) is a paradigm designed to tackle several issues of answer set programming tools. Recently, a method is proposed to find solutions to CASP programs by using satisfiability modulo theories (SMT) solvers.
This SMT-based approach is implemented in a system called EZSMT, which often outperforms its peers. Yet, it has several limitations. For instance, it is unable to process a large class of programs called "non-tight". This restriction does not allow users to express, for example, reachability relations between cities connected by roads on a map. Solving non-tight programs is important, because they are crucial in many applications.
Here we extend EZSMT for non-tight programs and constraints over mixed domains of reals and integers. We also extend EZSMT to allow the computation of multiple solutions. Our experimental analysis shows that the extended EZSMT system is a compatible tool compared to state-of-the-art CASP solvers CLINGCON and EZCSP.
No description.