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Two-dimensional semantics is a theory in the philosophy of language
that provides an account of meaning which is sensitive to the
distinction between necessity and apriority. Usually, this theory is
presented in an informal manner. In this thesis, I take first steps
in formalizing it, and use th...
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In this thesis I will give a formal definition of side effects. I will
do so by modifying a system for modelling program instructions and
program states, Quantified Dynamic Logic, to a system called DLA_f
(for Dynamic Logic with Assignments as Formulas), which in contrast to
QDL allows assignment...
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One of the most essential aspects of logic is the ability to bind
variables. Without that ability, we cannot represent generic rules in
a logical form. In the past decades there has been a lot of interest
in implementing logic on neural networks, but this was largely
restricted to propositional l...
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Phrase-Based Statistical Machine Translation (PBSMT) became a leading
paradigm in Statistical Machine Translation after its introduction in
2003. From the start, one has tried to improve PBSMT by using
linguistic knowledge, often by incorporating syntactic information
into the model.
This thesi...
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In this research, we focus on different types of polar questions, in
particular the difference between positive polar questions and
negative polar questions with high and low negation. We propose a
theoretical framework and empirically test some of the predictions of
the framework, focusing on th...
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Fix t, k and n such that k < n <= t and let EASY^n_{t,k} be the set of
all strings of length n that are generated by programs of size k in at
most t steps. It is not hard to see that for sufficiently large t (in
fact for t' > t log t for technical reasons) we have EASY^n_{t,k} ⊆
EASY^n_{t',k'}. ...
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Voting rules are functions aggregating the preferences of voters
regarding a set of alternatives, and the theoretical properties of
these objects are investigated in voting theory, as well as in
computational social choice, where we study their computational
aspects. The question of how much inf...
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In this thesis it is argued, supported by the relevant alternatives
theory, that epistemic operators are context dependent. They are
context dependent, in the sense that the context filters out certain
irrelevant alternatives from the information state of an agent. As a
consequence, rational know...
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This thesis examines truth theories. First, four relevant programs in
philosophy are considered. Second, four truth theories are compared
according to a range of criteria. The truth theories are categorised
according to Leitgeb’s eight criteria for a truth theory. The four
truth theories are then...
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This thesis is concerned with developing an adequate semantics for
counterfactual conditionals.
A counterfactual conditional is standardly taken to be an expression
of the form ‘if it had been the case that ϕ, it would have been the
case that ψ’, where ϕ and ψ are sentences and ϕ furthermore ex...
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In this thesis we develop a proof-theoretic formalization for John
Buridan’s theory of modal propositions. This thesis provides a
complete exegesis of the second chapter of De Consequentia and
develops the system G3_{syl} which we show is an adequate
formalization of Buridan’s theory.