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This dissertation explores the meaning and use of rising intonation in English
and French. The central theme was provided by the generally accepted claim
that there exists a typical question melody in American English. The term
`question' (as opposed to `interrogative'), however, was found to be
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This thesis is about logic of space. In it we use various techniques
of modal logic and topology to devise a class of increasingly stronger
logics of space. The underlying intuition is that for lots of
applications spatial intuition and spatial reasoning seem basic. And
this not only in applicati...
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This thesis concerns a remarkable new scientific development that
advances the state of the art in the field of data mining, or
searching for previously unknown but meaningful patterns in fully or
semi-automatic ways. A substantial amount of mathematical theory is
presented as well as very many (...
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The musical phrase
Is it? Who is it for? Where is it? What is it? When is it? Why is it?
This commonly used term, so intuitive to many musicians, has a variety
of associations with the terminology of many disciplines including
music, psychology, and linguistics. However, its nature remains
obscu...
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Syntactic structure plays a central role in most theories of language,
but it cannot be directly observed. The question this thesis investigates
is whether there is a relation between syntactic structure and immediately
observable properties of language, such as the statistics of the words
and...
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Quantum computing had a profound impact on cryptography. Shor's discovery of
an efficient quantum algorithm for factoring large integers implies that
many existing classical systems based on computational assumptions can be
broken, once a quantum computer is built. It is therefore imperative to f...
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This thesis investigates two main issues concerning the behavior of
rational agents, preference dynamics and agent diversity.
We take up two questions left aside by von Wright, and later also the
multitude of his successors, in his seminal book Logic of Preference in
1963: reasons for preference...
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In this thesis I propose a theory of decision making that does justice
to the idea that human agents can form future-directed intentions, but
which at the same time capitalizes on the resources of contemporary
theories of instrumental rationality and dynamic epistemic logic. The
result is a more ...
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In my thesis, I show that Order Logic interpreted over preorders
provides a unifying framework for individuals and groups to analyze
believe and preference change. Order Logic is a modal logic with three
modalities complete for the class of transitive and reflexive frames
whose fragments and exte...