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In many situations in our daily lives we act adequately, yet
unreflectively. With certainty and fluency we turn the pages of a
book, maintain an appropriate distance from the other people in an
elevator, and without deliberation we stop the pedestrian next to us,
who, while about to cross the...
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Quantum computers seem to have capabilities which go beyond those of
classical computers. A particular example which is important for
cryptography is that quantum computers are able to factor numbers much
faster than what seems possible on classical machines.
In order to actually build quantum c...
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Model selection is a strange and wonderful topic in learning theory
and statistics. At first glance the question seems very clear-cut:
how should we decide which set of probability distributions matches
the observations at hand best. This question comes up time and again
in many different contex...
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Modality is a broad linguistic concept. It is an umbrella term for all
sorts of meanings and can be expressed by many different grammatical
categories. Look for example at the following sentences.
(34) a. The door must be locked.
b. Maybe Jan is at home.
The meaning of the verb should i...
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Anaphora Resolved
Floris Roelofsen
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NOTE: This short abstract is intended for specialists in the field.
The preface of the dissertation provides a more gentle introduction,
and each individual chapter comes with a summary whic...
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This dissertation provides a critical assessment of investigations
into logical reasoning ability as reported in the psychology of
reasoning literature. This is achieved through a combination of
original empirical research with theoretical analysis, using insights
from formal semantics and philo...
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In the dissertation we study the complexity of generalized quantifiers
in natural language. Our perspective is interdisciplinary: we combine
philosophical insights with theoretical computer science, experimental
cognitive science and linguistic theories.
In Chapter 1 we argue for identifying a p...
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Children learn their mother tongue spontaneously and effortlessly
through communicative interaction with their environment; they do not
have to be taught explicitly or learn how to learn first. The ambient
language to which children are exposed, however, is highly variable
and arguably deficient ...
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In this thesis, we deal with classes of functions on Baire space. For
some important function classes, game representations are known and
proved to be very useful. The most prominent example is Wadge’s
characterization of the continuous func- tions that allowed the
development of the theory of t...
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This dissertation is an exercise in conceptual archeology. Using the
tools of contemporary logic we analyse texts in medieval logic and
reconstruct their logical theories by creating a formal framework which
models them. Our focus is medieval texts which deal with various
modalities: the writings...
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Does she know what he knows? And if so, what is she going to do?
This dissertation takes a computer science perspective on questions of
knowledge and interaction and presents approaches for endowing
artificial agents with corresponding reasoning capabilities.
To this end, we restrict general fr...