Contents Danish Summary (Dansk Resumé) 1 Acknowledgements 4 1. Introduction 6 1.1 Background........................................................... ..................................... 7 1.2 Cooperative analysis ..................................................................... .......... 11 1.3 Notes on vocabulary ..................................................................... ........... 11 1.4 Progression of this thesis ..................................................................... ... 14 2. Empirical background 18 2.1 The AT-project........................................................... .............................. 20 2.2 The EuroCoOp and EuroCODE projects................................................ 31 3. Six approaches to analysis 46 3.1 Yourdon: Managing the System Life Cycle............................................ 47 3.2 Jackson: System Development ......................................................

This paper is concerned with establishing broadly-based system-theoretic foundations and practical techniques for the problem of system identification that are rigorous, intuitively clear and conceptually powerful. A general formulation is first given in which two order relations are postulated on a class of models: a constant one of complexity; and a variable one of approximation induced by an observed behaviour. An admissible model is such that any less complex model is a worse approximation. The general problem of identification is that of finding the admissible subspace of models induced by a given behaviour. It is proved under very general assumptions that, if deterministic models are required then nearly all behaviours require models of nearly maximum complexity. A general theory of approximation between models and behaviour is then developed based on subjective probability concepts and semantic information theory The role of structural constraints such as causality, locality, finite memory, etc., are then discussed as rules of the game. These concepts and results are applied to the specific problem or stochastic automaton, or grammar, inference. Computational results are given to demonstrate that the theory is complete and fully operational. Finally the formulation of identification proposed in this paper is analysed in terms of Klir’s epistemological hierarchy and both are discussed in terms of the rich philosophical literature on the acquisition of knowledge. 1

Ontology is a burgeoning field, involving researchers

Object-oriented databases (OODBs) are believed to more naturally reflect the behavior and organization of complex application domains. The schema consists of a collection of classes, organized into hierarchies which nicely organize abstractions over the domain. Objects are created as instances of classes, encapsulating data and interpretation of data together. An important characteristic is the support for evolutionary programming, and so that existing programs may be extended with new classes without affecting other parts of the system.

The cognitive function of mental images with respect to the referential aspect of language is examined and used in the listener model ANTLIMA of the natural language system SOCCER. An operational realization of the reference relation used to recognize instances of spatial concepts in the results of a vision system and also to visualize locative expressions is presented and compared to A. Herskovits ' analysis of the semantics of spatial prepositions.

THE CULTURA PROJECT This paper presents a Web-based, cross-cultural, curricular initiative entitled Cultura, designed to develop foreign language students ' understanding of foreign cultural attitudes, concepts, beliefs, and ways of interacting and looking at the world. Our focus will be on the pedagogy of electronic media, with particular emphasis on the ways in which the Web can be used to reveal those invisible aspects of a foreign culture, thereby giving a voice to the elusive "silent language " 1 and empowering students to construct their own approach to crosscultural literacy. We examine these new areas of cultural knowledge which the Web now renders accessible and attempt to redefine the meaning of foreign language "teaching " in the new world of networked communication. This article is written by four of the instructors who have been using Cultura in their classes, two of them teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, and two at the Institut National des Télécommunications in Evry, France (one has since changed universities). This "four-voiced " approach serves to illustrate the multi-faceted aspects of the project and the different types of readings to which Cultura lends itself, and explains the shifts in perspective the reader will encounter. Cultura was first developed in the summer of 1997. Since then we have continued to experiment with and develop it, using it in university level courses. Last year, it was used experimentally at the secondary school level as well. This particular paper focuses mostly on the work done during the spring and fall semesters of 1999 between MIT and INT.

Heifetz, Meier and Schipper (2006) introduced unawareness structures. These are generalized state-space models that allow for non-trivial unawareness among several individuals and strong properties of knowledge. We show that a canonical unawareness structure arises naturally if states consist of maximally consistent sets of formulas in an appropriate axiom system. As a corollary, we obtain a strong soundness and completeness theorem for this axiom system with respect to the class of unawareness structures.

foundations of standard approaches to language studies involve an incoherence in their presuppositions. Second, we present an alternative approach that resolves this incoherence. Third, we discuss how this error manifests itself in categorial grammars and model theoretic possible worlds semantics. Fourth, we suggest some possible revisions in standard approaches to accommodate them to the alternative that we suggest. We arrive at a fundamentally functional, or pragmatic, conception - an interactive conception - of the nature of language and meaning. Contents 1.

The problem of representing the spatial structure of images, which arises in visual object processing, is commonly described using terminology borrowed from propositional theories of cognition, notably, the concept of compositionality. The classical propositional stance mandates representations composed of symbols, which stand for atomic or composite entities and enter into arbitrarily nested relationships.

Belief Revision as Propositional Update 2 In this study, we examine the problem of belief revision, defined as deciding whic h of several initially-accepted sentences to disbelieve, when new information presents a l ogical inconsistency with the initial set. In the first three experiments, the initial sentence set included a conditional sentence, a non-conditional sentence, and an inferred conclusi on drawn from the first two. The new information contradicted the inferred conclusion. Results indicated that the conditional sentences were more readily abandoned than non-c onditional sentences, even when either choice would lead to a consistent belief state, and that this preference was more pronounced when problems used natural language cover sto ries rather than symbols. The pattern of belief revision choices differed depending on whe ther the contradicted conclusion from the initial belief set had been a modus ponens or m odus tollens inference. Two additional experiments examined alternative model-theoretic definitions of minimal change to a belief state, using problems that contained multiple mo dels of the initial belief state and of the new information that provided the contradiction.