Peter Geach's puzzle of intentional identity is to explain how the claim ‘Hob thinks a witch has blighted Bob's mare, and Nob wonders whether she killed Cob's sow’ is compatible with there being no such witch. I clarify the puzzle and reduce it to the familiar problem of negative existentials. That problem is a paradox of representations that seem to include denials of commitment , to carry commitment to what they deny commitment to, and to be true. The best proposed (...) solutions can be understood through this paradox; I evaluate them, and defend a new solution. (shrink)

A characteristic feature of Protestant theology of the twentieth century is a turn to anthropology, the formation of anthropologically oriented theology. The reason for this is the social processes and general tendencies of the philosophical thought of that time. The delineation of religion from the state, the restoration of religion to the personal affairs of man predetermine the need for the understanding of man as a being that transcends to the supernatural. Defining in the conception of supernatural, God - both (...) in philosophy and in theology - now there is not cosmology, but an existential, human experience of existence. In this way, the soteriological issues acquire an individualistic color. Thus, the problems of sin, freedom of will and grace are interpreted in the context of the existence of an individual. Already in the twentieth century, this vector of development of Protestant theology was criticized. Therefore, the formation of Protestant anthropology was carried out in several directions. The study of the main tendencies of Protestant anthropology of the twentieth century is currently relevant, since it can provide a new direction in the search for an exit from the anthropological crisis of our time. (shrink)

Man suffers from a very particular fate, namely that of being besieged by questions which he cannot answer and cannot ignore either. The ability to pose questions like these is a key characteristic of the fundamental existential situation of mankind. Every person must find his or her own particular method of coping with such questions. This makes up a significant part of the human maturing process. People with dementia, having already found their personal solution to cope with the problem (...) of these unanswerable questions, radically stumble into this existential situation once again. The problem of this repetition is that the people with dementia can only make limited use, if indeed any use at all, of their previously successful biographical strategies. The drama of human existence as such thus repeats itself within a person with dementia. We must recognise the seriousness of this task. We thus must support people with dementia in coping existentially with this renewed task in the best possible way. The existential dignity of this task is no different from that of a young person. This insight is very important for the care of patients: people with dementia should be recognised as a people in an existential situation. (shrink)

Purpose. Aging is intricate process of self-transformation in view of involution of body, loss of sexual attractiveness, but at the same time, old age is a time for reconsideration of self-existence in time and in the world within coherence of life sense targets and their realization. Unique individual experience of growing old implemented in Ukrainian literature can complete the data received by gerontology. Moreover gender approach in literary gerontology highlights masculine / feminine phenotypical features of internal reverberating of aging. Theoretical (...) basis. To inquire into existential and psychological problems of aging exemplified in the twentieth-century Ukrainian Lyrics it is seems to be the most effective to employ philosophical and psychological approaches in gerontology, as well as feministic studies on elder female body discrimination, in particular in literature. Originality. This research paves the way to the development of gender and literary dimensions in Ukrainian gerontology and anthropology in general. Some of the existential and psychological problems of aging are revealed on the material of 20th-century Ukrainian poetry. The individual lyric experience of aging in different gender moods is anchored mostly in psychic, mental, sense-life strategies. Conclusions. Among the feminine strategies of aging self-reception there are observation of own elder body with anxiety and fear, its "invisibility", deepened feelings of loneliness, self-estrangement, but also finding the sense of life and soul harmony in own family, offspring. Masculine self-reception of aging deals with ideal spiritual model of Wise old man – more abstract than personal; masculine anxiety is caused by physical bodily declining, not attractiveness, but strength and power loosing. (shrink)

Finally, our argument suggests that the relationship and the distinction between literature and philosophy cannot be made in terms of a distinction between aesthetic and epistemological categories. All philosophy is condemned, to the extent that it is dependent upon figuration, to be literary and, as the depository of this very problem, all literature is to some extent philosophical. The apparent symmetry of these statements is not as reassuring as it sounds since what seems to bring literature and philosophy together is, (...) as in Condillac's argument about mind and object, a shared lack of identity or specificity. Contrary to common belief, literature is not the place where the unstable epistemology of metaphor is suspended by aesthetic pleasure, although this attempt is a constitutive moment of its system. It is rather the place where the possible convergence of rigor and pleasure is shown to be a delusion. The consequences of this lead to the difficult question whether the entire semantic, semiological, and performative field of language can be said to be covered by tropological models, a question which can only be raised after the proliferating and disruptive power of figural language has been fully recognized. Paul de Man, Tripp Professor in the humanities and chairman of the comparative literature department of Yale University, is the author of Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism. His previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, "Political Allegory in Rousseau," appeared in the Summer 1976 issue and appears in his book Allegories in Reading. (shrink)

mentation for languages such as Chinese. Almost no NLP task is truly standalone. The end-to-end performance of natural Most current systems for higher-level, aggre-.

This chapter demonstrates why the commonsensical idea of forgetting as simply a vice is problematic. It presents some philosophical arguments for the positive role of forgetting. Forgetting can be understood in many ways, for example forgetting as a cause of memory-seeming, forgetting as a reliable process of justification, forgetting as an intellectual virtue, and forgetting as a way of liberation. The polysemy of forgetting can be traced back to Plato’s conceptual distinction between ἐπιλήθομαι and λήθη. It echoes with the many (...) facets of forgetting by showing how the opposite of memory relates to different domains such as knowing and perception. Key to classifying the polysemy of forgetting is a taxonomy of forgetting according to the computational model of memory. It brings out how the tripartite stages of memory correspond to the different types of forgetting. (shrink)

According to Democritus' anthropogeny is a microcosmic consequence within the process of cosmogony. However, the case of man is a peculiarity: man, this atom complex, is well aware of himself, yet is not aware of what he must do. Man does not naturally do that which promotes the harmonious ordering of his atoms. We must create a second nature. Now it becomes possible for us to be as we must be according to our first nature. Democritus is the is first (...) thinker who explains to us what our nature is and who, from our being, derives an ought: he who wishes to do the right thing for both himself and others finds himself subject to the ought requirement to do that which brings the most calm to the atoms. This is a direct connection between being and ought, an extravagant mechanical existentialism. (shrink)

The study reveals the feature of determining the limitations of human existence, which affects moral and ethical beliefs and views. It is noted that the philosopher N. Abbagnano saw the need to adjust the philosophy of existentialism, reducing pessimistic tones that could interfere with the development of existential thinking. The aim of the article was to determine the moral capabilities of man in the situations of measuring existence in the positive context of philosophy N. Abbagnano. Accordingly, the study makes (...) an understanding of the role of existentialism as a philosophical current of the twentieth century; the role of death and freedom in human existence is determined; the problem of moral capabilities of a person in situations of limitation is highlighted.Attention is drawn to the key differences between the philosophy of existentialism and romanticism according to the views of the philosopher, from which follows the problem of the specificity of freedom and finiteness of man, as well as the importance of a sense of human life, taking into account his considerations about his finiteness. It is noted that the analysis of the views of existentialist philosophers prompted the philosopher to the idea of determining the positivity of human existence in situations of limitation. The moral responsibility of man is bound, according to N. Abbagnano, with the adoption of responsibility to themselves and society on its own mission, the definition of the limitation of freedom not only the moral principles of the environment, but also their own purpose of life.A special emphasis in the problem of human limitation is given to the theme of death in the philosophy of N. Abbagnano. Death is defined not simply as the fact of a person’s limb or death, but as the possibility of possibility. Death is a situation that no one can get around, and even predict. Therefore, death can interrupt the mission of human life at any time, and a person has no access to the secret of his own death, at least until its occurrence. It is the possibility of death that leads to the moral horizons of man and is prescribed in the moral and ethical environment of co-existence. It is indicated that the possibility has a similar nature to death, because its mystery is revealed when the possibility ceases to be only an opportunity, and therefore it is always beyond human understanding.Nature has a possible total definition of good and evil, which in the philosophy of N. Abbagnano not separated and are not opposed. Freedom Kok rent on both options simultaneously, and multiplied under the influence of freedom in a situation koeksisters. Attention is drawn to the definition of permanent affiliation to cocsistent of existence that begins with birth and does not end until death. And it is through co-existence that the possibility is possible. The moral horizons of koekzistentsii are limited not only by death, as a break in the ties of existence, violations of bindings, but also by the constant existence of good and evil, as inseparable parts of life. Through the creation of morality, man seeks being, seeks that enchanting state of rightness and truth, the finding of which should bring peace of certainty in situations of possibility. The conclusion is made that the limitation of a person to the possibility of the possible, his own finiteness is the positivity of human existence. (shrink)

In this book, Della Rocca traces out the conceptual links between key concepts and principles of Spinoza's system bearing on representation and the mind-body problem. In the course of doing so, he presents and defends a number of new, interesting theses about Spinoza's thought on these matters. The arguments are presented with impressive clarity and in great detail. All in all, the book is a significant contribution to the literature on Spinoza's metaphysics and epistemology, and should be read by anyone (...) with a serious interest in its historical subject or in the two perennial philosophical problems on which it focuses. (shrink)

The problem of alienation has come to the focus of philosophical discourse in terms of cogito’s loss of immediacy with the body and intimacy with the world, ever since Descartes—the founding father of modern thought—had his famous meditations. Putting the problem of alienation at the focus of philosophy, how should this human situation be reflected upon and the problem be addressed or dissolved at the least? One thing is clear that the method of enquiry cannot be purely intellectual wherein the (...) subject–object dichotomy has to be rigorously maintained. Rather, it has to turn intuitive at some stage, so that human subjective consciousness could be given its due place in the enquiry and the interplay of it with and the embeddedness of it in the material reality be revealed and accounted for as well. Only such an approach would address the problem at hand. But one cannot remain very optimistic about Western philosophy in this endeavor, due to the reasons to be elaborated in present paper. It is in this context that an enquiry into other philosophical systems becomes relevant. In the Eastern philosophical traditions, the issue at hand is addressed more creatively. Particularly in the Advaita Vedanta school of Indian Philosophy, the problem of alienation is tackled in an original way by elevating altogether the ‘being of man’ to a different level by way of an existential blending of his intellectual and intuitive capacities. Precisely in the Taittiriya Upanishad, man’s true nature is formulated in tune with nature, giving it a unique existential thrust. This conception once elaborated seems to be capable of productively addressing the issue at hand. An attempt will be made in the paper, at elucidating this view. (shrink)

John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill were very much aware of the problem of domestic violence. In the years between 1849 and 1853, they wrote a series of newspaper articles and pamphlets on domestic violence. These works are notable for their passion, insight and the way they prefigure contemporary discussions of this topic. Their thoughtful and detailed discussion is thus important not just for its historical interest, but for the light that it sheds on a complex problem that is (...) every bit as pressing in the twenty first century as it was in the nineteenth. (shrink)

Current methods of obtaining consent for emergency neonatal research are flawed. They risk aggravating the distress of parents of preterm and other sick neonates. This distress, and the inevitable time constraints, compromise understanding and voluntariness, essential components of adequately informed consent. Current practice may be unjust in over-representing babies of more vulnerable and deprived parents. The research findings may thus not be generalisable. Informing parents antenatally about the possible need for emergency neonatal research, with presumed consent and scope for opting (...) out, would address these problems. It would spare parents of sick neonates, already terrified by their baby's illness, further distress. Experience with opting out suggests that recruitment might increase, thus generating earlier results, without compromising parental understanding of the nature and purpose of the research. (shrink)

럼플과 골리앗에 대한 앨런 기버드의 유명한 사례가 소개된 이후 물체 중복(Material Coincidence)의 가능성은 많은 형이상학자들의 관심을 끌었다. 이 논쟁에 대해 복수론자들은 서로 다른 두 물체가 같은 시각, 같은 장소에 공존할 수 있다고 주장한 반면, 단일론자들은 그러한 가능성이 터무니없다고 믿었다. 당연하게도 복수론자들이 제시한 물체 중복의 사례들에 대해 다양한 방식의 반론들이 단일론자들에 의해 제기되었고 그 중 특히 근거지움 문제는 많은 복수론자들을 괴롭혔다. 하지만 최근 캐서린 코슬리키를 비롯한 일련의 복수론자들은 물체의 구성에 대한 아리스토텔레스의 질료형상론을 바탕으로 이 근거지움 문제를 해결하려고 시도한다. 같은 시각, 같은 (...) 장소에 두 물체가 존재할 수 있다는 믿음은 보통 그 장소에서 하나의 물체가 모두 가질 수는 없는 복수의 성질들이 예화되고 있다는 근거에 의해 지지되는데, 아리스토텔레스주의 복수론자들은 그러한 성질의 예화를 그 물체들이 각각 가지는 형상적 부분에 근거지우려고 한다. 여기서 나는 근거지움 문제에 대한 코슬리키의 해결책에 집중하면서 그의 이론이 심각한 문제에 직면함을 보인다. 다만 그러한 문제는 그가 개발하고 있는 신아리스토텔레스주의적 이론의 핵심 주장들을 포기하지 않고서도 해결될 수 있기 때문에 본 연구의 마지막에 그의 이론을 수정한 새로운 질료형상론의 가능성을 제시한다. (shrink)

We propose a model of natural language inference which identifies valid inferences by their lexical and syntactic features, without full semantic interpretation. We extend past work in natural logic, which has focused on semantic containment and monotonicity, by incorporating both semantic exclusion and implicativity. Our model decomposes an inference problem into a sequence of atomic edits linking premise to hypothesis; predicts a lexical semantic relation for each edit; propagates these relations upward through a semantic composition tree according to properties of (...) intermediate nodes; and joins the resulting semantic relations across the edit sequence. A computational implementation of the model achieves 70% accuracy and 89% precision on the FraCaS test suite. Moreover, including this model as a component in an existing system yields significant performance gains on the Recognizing Textual Entailment challenge. (shrink)

Corporate social responsibility becomes more and more prevalent in the business world and is considered as one of the factors to make purchase intentions by customers. Thus, corporations are obliged to implement CSR initiatives to attract their customers. Generation Z is born in the world with the internet and social media. They are more able to handle technology and reply on the internet or social media to receive or search for information. They are more concerned with social issues or environmental (...) problems. Therefore, CSR is one of the considerations when they make purchase decisions. This study is to explore whether CSR affects Generation Z purchase intentions in the food industry and which CSR categories have impacts on the purchase intention of Generation Z. A survey was used to collect the data from the youngsters at a post-secondary education institution. The findings showed that Generation Z will consider the CSR performance of the corporations in the food industry when they made purchase decisions. Most of the CSR initiatives, except shareholder related initiatives, had impacts on purchase intention. This may be due to the characteristics of Generation Z. (shrink)

One of the common targets that contemporary feminists are critical of concerning the problem of the body is Rene Descartes' mind and body relation. Feminist scholars can identify at least three lines of investigation of the body in contemporary thought that may be regarded as legacies of the Cartesian view, which treat the body as primarily an object for: 1) the natural sciences, particularly for the life sciences, biology, and medicine; 2) as an instrument or a machine at the disposal (...) of consciousness or allocating an animating, willful subjectivity; and 3) as a vehicle of expression of private thoughts and feelings; that is, as fundamentally passive and transparent. Recently, feminist scholars are seriously thinking of a new conceptual model that can displace Cartesian dualism and that can emancipate notions of the body from Cartesian dominant mechanistic models and metaphors. In this light, this paper turns to a Confucian theory of the body for revelation and the case of Mencius is introduced, in which the mind is regarded as the major component of the body and a coherent model is adopted. Can we then conclude to ask in what ways the reclaiming of the body in the Contemporary Western discussion may learn from the Confucian ideas of the body...? (shrink)

One of the common targets that contemporary feminists are critical of concerning the problem of the body is Rene Descartes' mind and body relation. Feminist scholars can identify at least three lines of investigation of the body in contemporary thought that may be regarded as legacies of the Cartesian view, which treat the body as primarily an object for: 1) the natural sciences, particularly for the life sciences, biology, and medicine; 2) as an instrument or a machine at the disposal (...) of consciousness or allocating an animating, willful subjectivity; and 3) as a vehicle of expression of private thoughts and feelings; that is, as fundamentally passive and transparent. Recently, feminist scholars are seriously thinking of a new conceptual model that can displace Cartesian dualism and that can emancipate notions of the body from Cartesian dominant mechanistic models and metaphors. In this light, this paper turns to a Confucian theory of the body for revelation and the case of Mencius is introduced, in which the mind is regarded as the major component of the body and a coherent model is adopted. Can we then conclude to ask in what ways the reclaiming of the body in the Contemporary Western discussion may learn from the Confucian ideas of the body...? (shrink)

It is widely assumed that selection history accounts of function can support a fully reductive naturalization of functional properties. I argue that this assumption is false. A problem with the alternative causal role account of function in this context is that it invokes the teleological notion of a goal in analysing real function. The selection history account, if it is to have reductive status, must not do the same. But attention to certain cases of selection history in biology, specifically those (...) involving meiotic drive, shows that selection historical explanations are available in the case of items without any plausible function. Making contributions to goals, here fitness, must be introduced as an additional constraint in the analysis, either explicitly, or implicitly by appeal to individual functions or the selection-of/selection-for distinction. (shrink)

In his article, "The End of Aesthetic Experience" (1997) Richard Shusterman studies the contemporary fate of aesthetic experience, which has long been regarded as one of the core concepts of Western aesthetics till the last half century. It has then expanded into an umbrella concept for aesthetic notions such as the sublime and the picturesque. I agree with Shusterman that aesthetic experience has become the island of freedom, beauty, and idealistic meaning in an otherwise cold materialistic and law-determined world. My (...) paper starts from the main dimensions of aesthetic experience in the history of Western aesthetics as concluded by Shusterman. In terms of our experiential practices in the fragmentation of modern life and the disjointed sensationalism of the media, I also agree with Shusterman that people are losing the capacity for deep experience and feeling, especially when we are undergoing various extensive series of informational revolutions. My paper is also a response to Shusterman's claim that the concept of aesthetic experience is worth recalling, not for formal definition but for art's reorientation toward values and populations that could restore its vitality and sense of purpose. I mention the recent calls for values and life concerns in art in the Anglo-American aesthetics circles, which has also turned to the possible strength of aesthetic experience, claiming that "Aesthetics is the Mother of Ethics." Amidst the discourse is the review of John Dewey's notion of "aesthetic experience," which claims to support a transcultural view and common patterns, as the relationship is structured around human needs. A basic question posed in the article is whether this Deweyan notion still remains equally influential as in the past and whether it really provides a satisfying answer to the problem of art and value? The discussion will turn then to neo-Confucian aesthetic models for reference, and to point out some meaningful comparative revelations. (shrink)

This paper presents a new method for producing a dictionary of subcategorization frames from unlabelled text corpora. It is shown that statistical filtering of the results of a finite state parser running on the output of a stochastic tagger produces high quality results, despite the error rates of the tagger and the parser. Further, it is argued that this method can be used to learn all subcategorization frames, whereas previous methods are not extensible to a general solution to the problem.

A growing number of contributors to environmental philosophy are beginning to rethink the field’s mission and practice. Noting that the emphasis of protracted conceptual battles over axiology may not get us very far in solving environmental problems, many environmental ethicists have begun to advocate a more pragmatic, pluralistic, and policy-based approach in philosophical discussions abouthuman-nature relationships. In this paper, we argue for the legitimacy of this approach, stressing that public deliberation and debate over alternative environmental ethics is necessary for (...) a culture of democracy to be upheld in decision making and policy formulation. Then we argue for a democratically tempered environmental ethics that is grounded in a practical understanding of the character of moral claims regarding the natural world. We offer the results of an empirical study of environmental ethics held by the public to illustrate the diversity in their moral commitments to nature. Finally, we conclude with a discussion of the implications of this ethical pluralism for policy discussions about the management of American public lands. (shrink)

This paper proposes a new architecture for textual inference in which finding a good alignment is separated from evaluating entailment. Current approaches to semantic inference in question answering and textual entailment have approximated the entailment problem as that of computing the best alignment of the hypothesis to the text, using a locally decomposable matching score. While this formulation is adequate for representing local (word-level) phenomena such as synonymy, it is incapable of representing global interactions, such as that between verb negation (...) and the addition/removal of qualifiers, which are often critical for determining entailment. We propose a pipelined approach where alignment is followed by a classification step, in which we extract features representing high-level characteristics of the entailment problem, and give the resulting feature vector to a statistical classifier trained on development data. (shrink)

In the past decade, several Descartes scholars have gone on record claiming that, for biological purposes, Descartes likely accepts the practical scientific necessity of the existence of “physical natures,” even while his official substance-mode ontology and his characterization of matter in terms of extension do not license the existence of physical natures. In this article, I elaborate on the historical context of Descartes’s biology, the “practical scientific necessity” just mentioned, and argue, contrary to other interpretations, that Descartes does offer a (...) philosophical justification for the existence of physical natures, albeit not by appeal to the categories of substance and mode, or matter as such, but by appeal to our “nature” as a union between mind and body. (shrink)

This paper analyzes the work of Emmanuel Levinas and René Girard and argues that both of them have as their central problem the phenomenon of human violence and both try to address this problem from their own religious tradition, Jewish for Levinas, Christian for Girard. They both pursue the concept of nonviolence to an extreme point in what each calls saintliness or holiness and both can be considered religious prophets of this extreme version of nonviolence.

Each of the following papers gives an account of a different UK clinical ethics committee. The committees vary in the length of time they have been established, and also in the main focus of their work. The accounts discuss the development of the committees and some of the ethical problems that have been brought to them. The issues raised will be relevant for other National Health Service (NHS) trusts in the UK that wish to set up such a committee.

The alignment problem—establishing links between corresponding phrases in two related sentences—is as important in natural language inference (NLI) as it is in machine translation (MT). But the tools and techniques of MT alignment do not readily transfer to NLI, where one cannot assume semantic equivalence, and for which large volumes of bitext are lacking. We present a new NLI aligner, the MANLI system, designed to address these challenges. It uses a phrase-based alignment representation, exploits external lexical resources, and capitalizes on (...) a new set of supervised training data. We compare the performance of MANLI to existing NLI and MT aligners on an NLI alignment task over the well-known Recognizing Textual Entailment data. We show that MANLI significantly outperforms existing aligners, achieving gains of 6.2% in F1 over a representative NLI aligner and 10.5% over GIZA++. (shrink)

We propose an approach to natural language inference based on a model of natural logic, which identifies valid inferences by their lexical and syntactic features, without full semantic interpretation. We greatly extend past work in natural logic, which has focused solely on semantic containment and monotonicity, to incorporate both semantic exclusion and implicativity. Our system decomposes an inference problem into a sequence of atomic edits linking premise to hypothesis; predicts a lexical entailment relation for each edit using a statistical classifier; (...) propagates these relations upward through a syntax tree according to semantic properties of intermediate nodes; and composes the resulting entailment relations across the edit sequence. We evaluate our system on the FraCaS test suite, and achieve a 27% reduction in error from previous work. We also show that hybridizing an existing RTE system with our natural logic system yields significant gains on the RTE3 test suite. (shrink)

We present a maximum-entropy based system for identifying Named Entities (NEs) in biomedical abstracts and present its performance in the only two biomedical Named Entity Recognition (NER) comparative evaluations that have been held to date, namely BioCreative and Coling BioNLP. Our system obtained an exact match f-score of 83.2% in the BioCreative evaluation and 70.1% in the BioNLP evaluation. We discuss our system in detail including its rich use of local features, attention to correct boundary identification, innovative use of external (...) knowledge resources including parsing and web searches, and rapid adaptation to new NE sets. We also discuss in depth problems with data annotation in the evaluations which caused the final performance to be lower than the optimal. (shrink)

Working speed as a latent variable reflects a respondent’s efficiency to apply a specific skill, or a piece of knowledge to solve a problem. In this study, the common assumption of many response time models is relaxed in which respondents work with a constant speed across all test items. It is more likely that respondents work with different speed levels across items, in specific when these items measure different dimensions of ability in a multidimensional test. Multiple speed factors are used (...) to model the speed process by allowing speed to vary across different domains of ability. A joint model for multidimensional abilities and multifactor speed is proposed. Real response time data are analyzed with an exploratory factor analysis as an example to uncover the complex structure of working speed. The feasibility of the proposed model is examined using simulation data. An empirical example with responses and response times is presented to illustrate the proposed model’s applicability and rationality. (shrink)

Zero pronominals challenge Type Logical Grammar in two ways. One, TLG displays a linear resource management regime for semantic composition, meaning that pronominals call for special treatment if they want to do resource multiplication. Two, as a grammar of lexicalism, TLG applies to phonologically realized lexical entries only, illegitimating the phonetically null items during syntactic derivation. Jägor extends the inventory of category-forming connectives of TLG by a third kind of implication that creates categories of anaphoric items and solves the first (...) problem above. This article goes a step further to tackle the second one. In order to formalize the constructions with zero pronominals, we design a ternary category A B C and include the latter into Jägor’s system. The proposed system is proof-theoretically well-behaved. It is complete, sound, and decidable. More importantly, zero pronominals of various forms can be derived in the system. (shrink)

In Pollard and Sag (1987) and Pollard and Sag (1994:Ch. 1–8), the subcategorized arguments of a head are stored on a single ordered list, the subcat list. However, Borsley (1989) argues that there are various defi- ciencies in this approach, and suggests that the unified list should be split into separate lists for subjects, complements, and specifiers. This proposal has been widely adopted in what is colloquially known as HPSG3 (Pollard and Sag (1994:Ch. 9) and other recent work in HPSG). (...) Such a move provides in HPSG an analog of the external/internal argument distinction generally adopted in GB, solves certain technical problems such as allowing prepositions to take complements rather than things identical in subcat list position to subjects, and allows recognition of the special features of subjects which have been noted in the LFG literature, where keyword grammatical relations are used. In HPSG3, it is these valence features subj, comps and spr whose values are ‘cancelled off’ (in a Categorial Grammar-like manner) as a head projects a phrase. A lexical head combines with its complements and subject or specifier (if any) according to the lexically inherited specification, as in (1). (shrink)

Jackendoff (1987, 1990) has brought up various problems with the current use of thematic roles (Kiparsky, 1987; Bresnan & Kanerva, 1989 and references cited therein) and suggested a different way of thinking of thematic roles as structural configurations in his semantic Lexical Conceptual Structures (LCSs). Conversely, Joshi (1989) has claimed that Jackendoff’s LCSs alone are insufficient, and that an analysis of certain facts in Marathi additionally requires the existence of a level of predicate-argument structure (PAS). Below we will mention (...) a few of Jackendoff’s arguments against the current conception of thematic roles. We will then look at Joshi’s arguments about the necessity of a level of PAS in addition to LCS and conclude that providing Jackendoff’s LCSs are integrated into a suitable syntactic theory, neither of her points are problematic to Jackendoff.1 From there we will go on to re-examine some of the facts of Marathi, and show that certain facts that have merely been stipulated or left unanalyzed when using thematic roles, receive a rather elegant treatment when described via a combination of their syntax and LCS. (shrink)

Part-of-speech tagging, like any supervised statistical NLP task, is more difficult when test sets are very different from training sets, for example when tagging across genres or language varieties. We examined the problem of POS tagging of different varieties of Mandarin Chinese. An analytic study first showed that unknown words were a major source of difficulty in cross-variety tagging. Unknown words in English tend to be proper nouns. By contrast, we found that Mandarin unknown words were mostly common nouns and (...) verbs. We showed these results are caused by the high frequency of morphological compounding in Mandarin; in this sense Mandarin is more like German than English. Based on this analysis, we propose a variety of new morphological unknown-word features for POS tagging, extending earlier work by others on unknown-word tagging in English and German. Our features were implemented in a maximum entropy Markov model. Our system achieves state-of-the-art performance in Mandarin tagging, including improving unknown-word tagging performance on unseen varieties in Chinese Treebank 5.0 from 61% to 80% correct. (shrink)

In this paper I want to look at what the evidence from Complex Predicates can tell us about the design parameters of an empirically adequate theory of Universal Grammar (UG). This is a fertile field for investigation because, according to the standard assumptions of the field, complex predicates are monoclausal with respect to some properties and multiclausal with respect to others and this tension can only be resolved by giving up some cherished beliefs. After introducing the problem in Section 1, (...) Sections 2–4 will lay out the basis of the dilemma. Sections 2 and 3 argue that Romance complex predicates have an articulated rightwardbranching phrase structure, and cannot be analyzed as some sort of verb compound or verbal complex while conversely Section 4 shows how in many respects a complex predicate does behave just like a single predicate. Hence we require a notion of monoclausality that these complex predicates satisfy despite their articulated phrase structure. (shrink)

The prescription of practice guidelines for consent in neonatal care that are appropriate for all interventions faces substantial problems. Current practice varies widely. Consent in neonatal care is compromised by postnatal constraints on information sharing and decision-making. Empirical research shows marked individual and cultural variation in the degree to which parents want to contribute to decision-making on behalf of their infants. Conflict between the parents’ wishes and the infant’s best interests could arise if consent for a recommended intervention were (...) refused, and parental refusal of consent may have to be overridden. Consent to an appropriate package of care (such as special, intensive or palliative care) may be morally preferable to a universal requirement to seek consent for all individual interventions entailed by that package. (shrink)

Technology for local textual inference is central to producing a next generation of intelligent yet robust human language processing systems. One can think of it as Information Retrieval++. It is needed for a search on male fertility may be affected by use of cell phones to match a document saying Startling new research into mobile phones suggests they can reduce a man’s sperm count up to 30%, despite the fact that the only word overlap is phones. But textual inference is (...) useful more broadly. It is an enabling technology for applications of document interpretation, such as customer response management, where one would like to conclude from the message My Squeezebox regularly skips during music playback that Sender has set up Squeezebox and Sender can hear music through Squeezebox, and information extraction, where from the text Jorma Ollila joined Nokia in 1985 and held a variety of key management positions before taking the helm in 1992, one wants to extract that Jorma Ollila has served as the CEO of Nokia, a relation that might be more formally denoted as role(CEO, Nokia, Jorma Ollila). Textual inference is a difficult problem (as the results from early evaluations have shown): current systems do statistically better than random guessing, but not by very much. Nevertheless, it is also an area where there is promising developing technology and a good deal of natural language community interest. In other words, it is an ideal research problem. To further this research agenda, data sets have been constructed to assess textual inference systems. This paper examines how the task of textual inference has been and should be defined and discusses what kind of evaluation data is appropriate for the task.1.. (shrink)

The study began with an introduction to Philosophy of Man. This Philosophical-Christological approach started with sense of self-awareness on this seemingly vain technological modern world. In the history of philosophy, there were three objects of study evolving by themselves, world, man and God in orderly fashion and repeating in interval phases. Self-experience shows three objects: first, existential unity (past), second, experiential unity (present) and third, transcendental unity (future). Western Philosophy banked on Aristotle’s notion of man as rational animal that (...) led to Dualism turned into Monism and finally into Pluralism making it harder to capsulate man’s unity. Thus, the universal question “what is man?” including his end remains unanswered. The problem with Western-Aristotelian Thought was its dependence on rationality as ultimate and highest faculty of man. The Greeks believed in immortality of soul but contradicted reality that human mind has no power over death (mortality). Faith transcends mortal-natural state of man however not in proud and arrogant manner but in utter surrender and subjection (Paschal). Faith turns truth from objective to personal. God’s and man’s identity was both revealed. Man as God’s image becomes definite in the revelation about Christ, the Son of God - the Perfect Man Eph. 4.13. KEYWORDS: Philosophy, Christ, Perfect Man, Philosophical-Christological approach,Christian anthropology, Qualitative Research Design, Philippines. (shrink)

A growing number of contributors to environmental philosophy are beginning to rethink the field’s mission and practice. Noting that the emphasis of protracted conceptual battles over axiology may not get us very far in solving environmental problems, many environmental ethicists have begun to advocate a more pragmatic, pluralistic, and policy-based approach in philosophical discussions abouthuman-nature relationships. In this paper, we argue for the legitimacy of this approach, stressing that public deliberation and debate over alternative environmental ethics is necessary for (...) a culture of democracy to be upheld in decision making and policy formulation. Then we argue for a democratically tempered environmental ethics that is grounded in a practical understanding of the character of moral claims regarding the natural world. We offer the results of an empirical study of environmental ethics held by the public to illustrate the diversity in their moral commitments to nature. Finally, we conclude with a discussion of the implications of this ethical pluralism for policy discussions about the management of American public lands. (shrink)

Dictionaries have long been seen as an essential contribution by linguists to work on endangered languages. We report on preliminary investigations of actual dictionary usage and usability by 76 speakers, semi-speakers and learners of Australian Aboriginal languages. The dictionaries include: electronic and printed bilingual Warlpiri-English dictionaries, a printed trilingual Alawa-Kriol- English dictionary, and a printed bilingual Warumungu-English dictionary. We examine competing demands for completeness of coverage and ease of access, and focus on the prospects of electronic dictionaries for solving many (...) traditional problems, based in particular on observations on the usability of a prototype interface developed in our project. The flexibility of computer interfaces can help accommodate different needs including those of speakers with emerging literacy skills, but they are not useful in communities where computer access is generally unavailable. (shrink)

The article gives a detailed view of the existential psychoanalysis of Swiss philosopher and psychologist Medard Boss. Based on the fundamental ontology of M. Heidegger, M. Boss criticizes the psychodynamic theories of the human psyche and turns to the analysis of the problem of human nature. A person, from the Boss's point of view, can only be understood as a person in the world (being-in-the-world). Through human existence, being can manifest itself as such. This is the destination of man. (...) The basic existential category of M. Boss is the concept of "openness". The openness of existence allows us to get to know other people and respond to their own call to us. Existence is characterized by the Boss as joint, complicit, endowed with "presence", which is an ensemble of possibilities. M. Boss defines human existence through the existentials of spatiality, temporality, corporeality, eventfulness in the shared world, mood, historicity, and mortality. The realization of existence, according to the Boss, is possible only in the free choice that a person is initially endowed with, but which he may lose in the process of socialization. Blocking openness and freedom leads a person to neuroticism and illness. The article also analyzes the essence of the psychotherapeutic approach of M. Boss, which is based on the desire to understand a person through "highlighting" and openness. The article shows the opposition of existential analysis of the classical psychoanalytic tradition. (shrink)

A significant portion of the world’s text is tagged by readers on social bookmarking websites. Credit attribution is an inherent problem in these corpora because most pages have multiple tags, but the tags do not always apply with equal specificity across the whole document. Solving the credit attribution problem requires associating each word in a document with the most appropriate tags and vice versa. This paper introduces Labeled LDA, a topic model that constrains Latent Dirichlet Allocation by defining a one-to-one (...) correspondence between LDA’s latent topics and user tags. This allows Labeled LDA to directly learn word-tag correspondences. We demonstrate Labeled LDA’s improved expressiveness over traditional LDA with visualizations of a corpus of tagged web pages from del.icio.us. Labeled LDA outperforms SVMs by more than 3 to 1 when extracting tag-specific document snippets. As a multi-label text classifier, our model is competitive with a discriminative baseline on a variety of datasets. (shrink)

Introduction: Alcohol approach bias, the tendency to automatically move toward alcohol cues, has been observed in people who drink heavily. However, surprisingly, some alcohol-dependent patients demonstrate an alcohol avoidance bias. This inconsistency could be explained by the clinical or demographic profile of the population studied, yet this has not been examined in approach bias modification trials to date. We aimed to determine the proportion of patients with an approach or avoidance bias, assess whether they differ on demographic and drinking measures, (...) and to examine the clinical correlates of approach bias.Method: These research questions were addressed using baseline data from 268 alcohol-dependent patients undergoing inpatient withdrawal treatment who then went on to participate in a trial of ABM.Results: At trial entry, 155 had an alcohol approach bias and 113 had an avoidance bias. These two groups did not differ on any demographic or relevant drinking measures. Approach bias was significantly and moderately associated with total standard drinks consumed in the past 30 days but no other indices of alcohol consumption or problem severity.Conclusion: Whilst the majority of alcohol-dependent patients showed an alcohol approach bias, those with an avoidance bias did not differ in demographic or clinical characteristics, and the strength of approach bias related only to recent consumption. Further research is needed to develop more accurate and personally tailored measures of approach bias, as these findings likely reflect the poor reliability of standard approach bias measures. (shrink)

A growing number of contributors to environmental philosophy are beginning to rethink the field’s mission and practice. Noting that the emphasis of protracted conceptual battles over axiology may not get us very far in solving environmental problems, many environmental ethicists have begun to advocate a more pragmatic, pluralistic, and policy-based approach in philosophical discussions abouthuman-nature relationships. In this paper, we argue for the legitimacy of this approach, stressing that public deliberation and debate over alternative environmental ethics is necessary for (...) a culture of democracy to be upheld in decision making and policy formulation. Then we argue for a democratically tempered environmental ethics that is grounded in a practical understanding of the character of moral claims regarding the natural world. We offer the results of an empirical study of environmental ethics held by the public to illustrate the diversity in their moral commitments to nature. Finally, we conclude with a discussion of the implications of this ethical pluralism for policy discussions about the management of American public lands. (shrink)