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This dissertation studies the presuppositions and anaphoric properties of interrogative words. These phenomena both contribute to the semantic and pragmatic effects of questions in a discourse. Presuppositions impose restrictions on the common ground. Interrogative words can raise discourse refer...
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Wikipedia has become a central venue for the public consumption of scientific knowledge. As an open, collaboratively edited encyclopedia, it not only reflects the broader information ecosystem but also shapes how science is accessed, interpreted, and debated by millions of users worldwide. In thi...
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This thesis studies non-wellfounded proof theory. In this setting, proofs may contain infinitely long branches or cycles.
In order to disallow absurd reasoning, a so-called soundness condition is formulated on those infinite branches and cycles.
The main challenge in non-wellfounded proof the...
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The main questions studied in this thesis can be broadly stated as follows: given an NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem and a suboptimal solution to this problem – obtained, for instance, by an efficient approximation algorithm – how close can this solution get to the optimal one? The qual...
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Language models increasingly shape how people access information, make decisions, and understand social issues.
Although they are often presented as neutral tools, these systems can reflect and reinforce social biases in subtle ways, influencing stereotypes, expectations, and judgments about di...
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In online environments, most people expect their data and communications to remain private and to be readable only by the intended recipients. While this expectation is often taken for granted, it is not easy to design practical mechanisms for securing our online data and communications. The fiel...
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This thesis investigates the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) with regard to the processing of metaphor and humor. Metaphor and humor are indispensable parts of human cognition and communication, yet they can pose challenges to LLMs. As LLMs enter the lives of people around the world,...
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This thesis investigates the lattices of tense logics. A tense logic is a normal bimodal logic equipped with a future-looking necessity modality $\Box$ and a past-looking possibility modality $\blacklozenge$, with the modalities $\Box$ and $\blacklozenge$ forming an adjoint pair. For each tense l...
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