This book is a study of the category of definiteness in the light of research on mental spaces and frames. The author formulates a set of eight uniform rules for the use of the definite, indefinite, and zero articles in English and German. The Concept of Definiteness presents an algorithm for nominal reference resolution that uses the definiteness value of each noun phrase to guide the search for its referent. The book discusses the results of the application of an automated system based on the proposed algorithm to texts in modern English. It also demonstrates applicability of the selected approach to text fragments representing all major historical variants of the German language.

The aim of this study is twofold: firstly, to provide an overview of research findings on the acquisition and use of articles in English as a second language; secondly, to investigate this issue from a phraseological perspective. The book also presents an examination of various linguistic accounts of the English article system with respect to their application to English language teaching. In view of the growing body of theoretical and empirical studies indicating that language use is to a considerable degree phraseologically motivated, this book argues for a connection between formulaicity and correct article use. This possibility is explored in two studies presented in the final chapter, which suggest that correctness in the use of articles depends on the frequency of the phrases in which they appear. These findings support the view that frequency-driven conventionality in language may play a role in the acquisition and use of articles in L2 English. “This is a very important contribution to the discussion of the L2 acquisition of articles, with particular regard to the L2 acquisition of English. Such a discussion is required in view of the confusing variety of opinions expressed on this matter, and the unsatisfactory nature of the pedagogical advice on offer to teachers of English as an L2. Dr. Leśniewska’s study reviews the relevant literature interestingly and fully, and it proposes an approach to article acquisition in L2 English which is long overdue.” Prof. David Singleton, Fellow Emeritus, Trinity College

Lists citations with abstracts for aerospace related reports obtained from world wide sources and announces documents that have recently been entered into the NASA Scientific and Technical Information Database.

This handbook presents an overview of the phenomenon of reference - the ability to refer to and pick out entities - which is an essential part of human language and cognition. In the volume's 21 chapters, international experts in the field offer a critical account of all aspects of reference from a range of theoretical perspectives. Chapters in the first part of the book are concerned with basic questions related to different types of referring expression and their interpretation. They address questions about the role of the speaker - including speaker intentions - and of the addressee, as well as the role played by the semantics of the linguistic forms themselves in establishing reference. This part also explores the nature of such concepts as definite and indefinite reference and specificity, and the conditions under which reference may fail. The second part of the volume looks at implications and applications, with chapters covering such topics as the acquisition of reference by children, the processing of reference both in the human brain and by machines. The volume will be of interest to linguists in a wide range of subfields, including semantics, pragmatics, computational linguistics, and psycho- and neurolinguistics, as well as scholars in related fields such as philosophy and computer science.

The papers in this volume comprise the refereed proceedings of the conference 'Artificial Intelligence in Theory and Practice' (IFIP AI 2006), which formed part of the 19th World Computer Congress of IFIP, the International Federation for Information Processing (WCC- 2006), in Santiago, Chile in August 2006. The conference is organised by the IFIP Technical Committee on Artificial Intelligence (Technical Committee 12) and its Working Group 12.5 (Artificial Intelligence Applications). All papers were reviewed by at least two members of our Programme Committee. The best papers were selected for the conference and are included in this volume. The international nature of IFIP is amply reflected in the large number of countries represented here. The conference featured invited talks by Rose Dieng, John Atkinson, John Debenham and myself. IFIP AI 2006 also included the Second IFIP Symposium on Professional Practice in Artificial Intelligence, organised by Professor John Debenham, which ran alongside the refereed papers. I should like to thank the conference chair. Professor Debenham for all his efforts in organising the Symposium and the members of our programme committee for reviewing an unexpectedly large number of papers to a very tight deadline. This is the latest in a series of conferences organised by IFIP Technical Committee 12 dedicated to the techniques of Artificial Intelligence and their real-world applications. The wide range and importance of these applications is clearly indicated by the papers in this volume. Further information about TCI 2 can be found on our website http://www.ifiptcl2.org.

In order to exchange knowledge, humans need to share a common lexicon of words as well as to access the world models underlying that lexicon. What is a natural process for a human turns out to be an extremely hard task for a machine: computers can’t represent knowledge as effectively as humans do, which hampers, for example, meaning disambiguation and communication. Applied ontologies and NLP have been developed to face these challenges. Integrating ontologies with (possibly multilingual) lexical resources is an essential requirement to make human language understandable by machines, and also to enable interoperability and computability across information systems and, ultimately, in the Web. This book explores recent advances in the integration of ontologies and lexical resources, including questions such as building the required infrastructure (e.g., the Semantic Web) and different formalisms, methods and platforms for eliciting, analyzing and encoding knowledge contents (e.g., multimedia, emotions, events, etc.). The contributors look towards next-generation technologies, shifting the focus from the state of the art to the future of Ontologies and Lexical Resources. This work will be of interest to research scientists, graduate students, and professionals in the fields of knowledge engineering, computational linguistics, and semantic technologies.