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Traditional discourses upon literature have been predicated upon the ability to refer to a text that others may consult (Landow, 1994, p. 33). Texts that involve elements of feedback and non-trivial decision-making on the part of the reader (Aarseth, 1997, p. 1) therefore present a challenge to readers and critics alike. Since a persuasive case has been made against a critical method that sets out to ``identify the task of interpretation as a task of territorial exploration and territorial mastery'' (Aarseth, p. 87), this paper proposes the use of readers in an empirically based approach to hypertext fiction. Meta-interpretation, a method that combines individual responses to a text, reading logs, screen recordings and limited qualitative/quantitative analysis, and critical interpretation is outlined. By analysing readers' responses it is possible to suggest both the ways that textual elements may have influenced or determined readers' choices and the ways that readers' choices ``configure'' the text. The method thus addresses Espen Aarseth's concerns and illuminates interesting features of interactive processes in fictional environments. The paper is divided into two parts: the first part sketches out meta-interpretation through consideration of the main problems confronting the literary critic; the second part describes reading research aimed at generating data for the literary critic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper responds to criticism of the Kripkean account of logical truth in first-order modal logic. The criticism, largely ignored in the literature, claims that when the box and diamond are interpreted as the logical modality operators, the Kripkean account is extensionally incorrect because it fails to reflect the fact that all sentences stating truths about what is logically possible are themselves logically necessary. I defend the Kripkean account by arguing that some true sentences about logical possibility are not logically necessary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper describes our recent developments in automatic extraction of translation equivalents from parallel corpora. We describe three increasingly complex algorithms: a simple baseline iterative method, and two non-iterative more elaborated versions. While the baseline algorithm is mainly described for illustrative purposes, the non-iterative algorithms outline the use of different working hypotheses which may be motivated by different kinds of applications and to some extent by the languages concerned. The first two algorithms rely on cross-lingual POS preservation, while with the third one POS invariance is not an extraction condition. The evaluation of the algorithms was conducted on three different corpora and several pairs of languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1979 the author spent the summer at a National Endowment for the Humanities summer seminar at Princeton with Richard Rorty, an experience which had numerous consequences, including a very Rortyan paper subsequently published in Human Studies called "Social theory," without wholes. Over this summer he has also worked on a manuscript that grew out a long article published in Human Studies on Max Weber and the fact-value distinction entitled "The limits of reason and some limitations of Weber's morality." The research that he was doing in the Princeton library was primarily concerned with filling in the context in which Weber had made his famous statements about fact and value, and also with examining the sequel of those writings in subsequent philosophy. This topic represents an important and distinctive strand in the tradition of continental philosophy, something that has now increasingly come to be recognized.