Search results for "ambiguity"
showing 10 items of 105 documents
Publish By Example
2008
We propose an approach for producing database publishing programs by example. The main idea is to interactively build an example document, representative of the program output. The system infers from this document, without ambiguity, the publishing program. The end-user does not need to know a programming language, a query language or the database schema.
Arabesques des images de l'ironie
2006
The author of this article analyzes the field of images of irony, starting from some Douglas C. Muecke’s works and some other personal analyses developed in «Poétique de l’ironie». He questions himself about the tension that exists between a possible archetypal image of irony, which would provide a vertical relationship of power, and its most recent images, which would highlight the fundamental ambiguity of the phenomenon. Between rhetoric and hermeneutics, between violence and conciliation, the outline of an arabesque of irony is defined, which allows us to organize the field of study around the notion of symmetry. Resuming important commentaries made by Sören Kierkegaard and Connop Thirlw…
An AHP-based approach to PMISs assessment
2015
The project management environment gets complex and subject to uncertainty. The firm's managers need of tools supporting the decision–making process in order to properly manage project information. PMISs provide features facilitating the project management. The variety of software and the ambiguity of features meaning make the choice of the PMIS a difficult task. The literature analysis confirms the importance of user engagement in features and PMIS assessment and the lack of methodologies satisfying such a task. The paper focuses on the classification and assessment of features of PMIS considering the firm's needs. A case study is presented for the evaluation of a PMISs sample.
A model to assess the behavioral impacts of consultative knowledge based systems
1997
This paper develops a research model to study the behavioral impacts of consultative knowledge based systems (KBS). An experiment was conducted with 36 experienced MBA students in marketing management to explore to what extent their decisions were affected by the following factors: user participation in updating the knowledge-base of the KBS, ambiguity of decision setting, routinization of usage, and source credibility of the expertise embedded in the KBS. Results show that ambiguity and source credibility affect user acceptance of the KBS recommendation and cause them to revise decisions. Implications of these findings for the design of consultative KBS are discussed.
What Makes for Fair Schooling?
2007
Slogans calling for “une ecole juste” (fair schooling) are often as vague as they are effective in mobilising public opinion: though there is apparent agreement on the desirability of greater fairness in education, the matter of defining fair schooling parameters is extremely complex and riddled with ambiguity.
Polar meaning and “expletive” negation in approximative adverbs
2005
In this paper we provide a synchronic and diachronic analysis of an instance of so-called “expletive” negation in the Spanish approximative adverb por poco. Synchronically, we show that this adverb, when combined with the sentence negator no, is ambiguous between ~p (“expletive”) and ~~p (“canonical”) meanings. Diachronically, we show that this ambiguity arose due to a change in the negation system of Spanish around the fifteenth century. As a result, the supposed instances of “expletive” negation found in present-day uses of por poco are not really expletive at all, but rather are a holdover from the Old Spanish requirement of preverbal negative concord.
British-American Contrasts in the Use of the Past Perfect: Negotiating Ambiguity versus Redundancy?
2021
Abstract The present study provides an empirical analysis of British-American contrasts in the overall use of the past perfect as well as its functional distribution. Studies on variation according to national variety report a decline of the past perfect spearheaded by American English (cf. Elsness, J. 1997. The Perfect and Preterite in Contemporary and Earlier English (Topics in English Linguistics 21). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyte; Bowie, J., S. Wallis, and B. Aarts. 2013. “The Perfect in Spoken British English.” In The Verb Phrase in English. Investigating Recent Language Change with Corpora, edited by B. Aarts, J. Close, G. Leech, and S. Wallis, 318–52. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press…
I saw this somewhere else: the Spanish Ambiguous Words (SAW) database
2017
The present paper describes the Spanish Ambiguous Words (SAW) database, which comprises 210 words (133 polysemous and 77 homographs). Three-hundred and fifteen Spanish university students took part in the study on which SAW is based. First, subjective word meanings and senses were collected by means of a meaning retrieval task. Two judges then assigned participants’ responses to different categories of meaning according to lexicographical and statistical criteria. Results showed that, while there was a relatively high relationship between the number of senses included in the dictionary and those provided by participants (r = .62), regression analyses on lexical decision and naming times rev…
Languaging in Ultima Thule: Multilingualism in the Life of a Sami Boy
2008
Abstract In this paper we investigate multilingualism as a phenomenon which pervades different social and cultural levels but is manifested in the everyday life of multilingual individuals. As an illustration, we examine multilingualism from the perspective of a young Sami boy, Ante, and explore how different languages function as a complex – but at times problematic – set of resources for him. To capture the complexity and fluidity in the relationships between various languages in his life, we base our theorising on such concepts as ‘linguistic resources’, ‘heteroglossia’ and ‘languaging’. With the help of multimodal data we examine how the linguistic resources present in Ante's daily life…
Discovering prominence and its role in language processing: an individual (differences) approach
2015
Abstract It has been suggested that, during real time language comprehension, the human language processing system attempts to identify the argument primarily responsible for the state of affairs (the “actor”) as quickly and unambiguously as possible. However, previous work on a prominence (e.g. animacy, definiteness, case marking) based heuristic for actor identification has suffered from underspecification of the relationship between different cue hierarchies. Qualitative work has yielded a partial ordering of many features (e.g. MacWhinney et al. 1984), but a precise quantification has remained elusive due to difficulties in exploring the full feature space in a particular language. Feat…