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Lambek categorial grammars is a class of formal grammars based on the Lambek calculus. Pentus proved in 1993 that they generate exactly the class of context-free languages without the empty word. In this paper, we study categorial grammars based on the Lambek calculus with the permutation rule LP. Of particular interest is the product-free fragment of LP called the Lambek-van Benthem calculus LBC. Buszkowski in his 1984 paper conjectured that grammars based on the Lambek-van Benthem calculus (LBC-grammars for short) generate exactly permutation closures of context-free languages. In this paper, we disprove this conjecture by presenting a language generated by an LBC-grammar that is not a permutation closure of any context-free language. Firstly, we introduce an ad-hoc modification of vector addition systems called linearly-restricted branching vector addition systems with states and additional memory (LRBVASSAMs for short) and prove that the latter are equivalent to LBC-grammars. Then we construct an LRBVASSAM that generates a non-semilinear set and thus disprove Buszkowski's conjecture. Since Buszkowski's conjecture is false, not so much is known about the languages generated by LBC-grammars or by LP-grammars. The equivalence of LRBVASSAMs and LBC-grammars allows us to establish a number of their properties. We show that LP-grammars generate the same class of languages as LBC-grammars; that is, removing product from LP does not decrease expressive power of corresponding categorial grammars. We also prove that this class of languages is closed under union, intersection, concatenation, and Kleene plus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN), is a standardized graphical language used for the graphical modeling of business processes. A BPMN model is composed of several small graphs called elements; these elements make it possible to describe the activities, the events, and the interactions between the components of a business process. Among the essential elements of BPMN are gateways, which control the flow of data. However, the big challenge of these gateways is the existence of several interpretations of the same BPMN model containing gateways; this is due to the informal and ambiguous definition. Several works have proposed the formalization of gateways using formal languages such as process algebras, Petri nets, etc. The purpose of this article is to propose a formalization of BPMN gateways using the formal language DD-LOTOS. DDLOTOS is defined on a semantics of true parallelism called maximality semantics and allows to support distribution and temporal constraints. We then propose the verification of certain properties using the UPPAAL model checker. Our approach has been validated through a case study representing the online purchasing process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles in the issue on topics including the Construction Grammar, specifically exploring how constructional approaches can be integrated and utilized in formal grammar.

In this paper we study the behaviour of conjugacy languages in virtual graph products, extending results by Ciobanu et al. [13]. We focus primarily on virtual graph products in the form of a semi-direct product. First, we study the behaviour of twisted conjugacy representatives in right-angled Artin and Coxeter groups. We prove regularity of the conjugacy geodesic language for virtual graph products in certain cases, and highlight properties of the spherical conjugacy language, depending on the automorphism and ordering on the generating set. Finally, we give a criterion for when the spherical conjugacy language is not unambiguous context-free for virtual graph products. We can extend this further in the case of virtual RAAGs, to show the spherical conjugacy language is not context-free. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes an interpretable geometry solution based on the formal language set of text and diagram. Geometry problems are solved using machines; however, machines encounter challenges in natural language processing and computer vision. Significant progress has improved existing methods in the extraction of geometric formal languages. However, the neglect of the graph structure information in the formal language and the lack of further refinement of the extracted language set can lead to poor theorem prediction and poor accuracy in problem solving. In this paper, a formal language graph is constructed using the extracted formal language set and applied to theorem prediction using a graph convolutional network. To better extract the relationship set of diagram elements, an improved diagram parser is proposed. The test results indicate that the improved method has good results when solving interpretable geometry problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Depression is a severe mental health issue. The user‐generated content on social media (SM) is growing nowadays. Some computational approaches have been proposed for detecting depression based on users' SM data. However, because of the use of formal language, short range of words and misspellings in the SM data, depression detection (DD) is a challenging task. This paper proposes a novel deep learning (DL) technique for performing DD of the SM data with the help of the hybrid feature selection (FS) mechanism. Initially, two publicly available datasets containing user tweets are collected for implementing the proposed research model. Then the collected datasets are preprocessed for further processing. The preprocessing phase includes critical processes that contribute to creating a ready‐to‐use dataset for training and testing. After preprocessing, the preprocessed data is divided into prime and non‐prime words based on the dictionary approach. After that, the hybrid FS approach is implemented to select the most relevant features from the prime and non‐prime words for higher classification accuracy (AC). In the hybrid model, firstly Term Frequency Inverse Document Frequency integrated Modified Information Gain (TFIDF‐MIG) approach is proposed that assigns the score value of each prime and non‐prime word in the dataset. Secondly, optimal features are selected from the weighted features using the Improved Elephant Herding Algorithm (IEHA). Finally, the decided features from the hybrid model are fed into the DL model, namely attention included improved ReLU‐based Convolution Neural Network with Long Short‐Term Memory (AIRCNN‐LSTM) for DD. Experiments are performed on the collected datasets to assess the proposed model's performance efficiency. The results of the extensive experiments show that the presented work outperforms existing techniques regarding DD classification AC by locating the best solutions. At the same time, it reduces the number of features chosen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of digitalization and participatory culture, pop culture has sparked numerous online linguistic practices exhibiting the potential for informal language learning. This study centers around an online community consisting of Chinese fans of Spanish-language pop music. Adopting the virtual ethnography approach and using mixed methods including interviews and web-crawling of fan production, we collected data from one particular member who devotes his free time to translating Spanish-language song lyrics into Chinese, and we analyze how informal language learning takes place in this context. Our results indicate that 1) the flexibility of roles and collaborations within the community contribute to the co-construction of knowledge; 2) fan practices are fueled by the technology-facilitated fulfillment of emotional needs and the formation of a shared identity; and 3) systematic strategies appear when amateur online translators go about trying to translate colloquial expressions in a foreign language. Among these strategies are the triangulation of meanings across lyrics, the use of multiple online tools, a reliance on feedback from fellow community members, and a critical approach to sources with an eye to ensuring their reliability. These findings showing highly specialized information retrieval and critical literacy skills in fan practices could serve as inspiration for integrating lyrics translations into formal language education to enhance the acquisition of non-standardized vocabulary and the cultivation of critical thinking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to the language-of-thought hypothesis, regular sequences are compressed in human memory using recursive loops akin to a mental program that predicts future items. We tested this theory by probing memory for 16-item sequences made of two sounds. We recorded brain activity with functional MRI and magneto-encephalography (MEG) while participants listened to a hierarchy of sequences of variable complexity, whose minimal description required transition probabilities, chunking, or nested structures. Occasional deviant sounds probed the participants' knowledge of the sequence. We predicted that task difficulty and brain activity would be proportional to the complexity derived from the minimal description length in our formal language. Furthermore, activity should increase with complexity for learned sequences, and decrease with complexity for deviants. These predictions were upheld in both fMRI and MEG, indicating that sequence predictions are highly dependent on sequence structure and become weaker and delayed as complexity increases. The proposed language recruited bilateral superior temporal, precentral, anterior intraparietal, and cerebellar cortices. These regions overlapped extensively with a localizer for mathematical calculation, and much less with spoken or written language processing. We propose that these areas collectively encode regular sequences as repetitions with variations and their recursive composition into nested structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: The automation of programming, which lies at the intersection of software engineering and artificial intelligence, enables machines to automatically generate programs that satisfy given requirements. In the context of B formal design modeling, one of the challenges is the refactoring of substitutions in design specifications, which often uses state transitions to describe how program or system statuses change during execution. This paper proposes a condition and substitution refactoring algorithm for the B formal specification language. The aim of the work is to automatically derive B operational predicates based on given transitions. The work has been extremely useful to machine‐driven formal design model repair as well as automated design specification generation. Given a set of state transitions, common relations of their state variables can be discovered and clustered into a number of classes. These relations can be further used to synthesize substitutions that derive new states from existing states. To restrict application domains of the synthesized substitutions, conditions that guard these substitutions are generated using first‐order logic. We have implemented the proposed algorithm as an extension to the ProB model checker. Experiments were conducted based on the B model public dataset. The evaluation results demonstrated that our solution is able to synthesize conditions and substitutions for various sets of state transitions in a wide range of B models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Featured Application: This work proposes a working set of rules for translating English sentences into the formal language of non-axiomatic logic (NAL). The proposed translation takes advantage of several linguistic tools for pre-processing and can be used for commonsense reasoning via non-deductive inferences formalized in NAL. Non-axiomatic logic (NAL) is a term-based, non-monotonic, multi-valued logic with evidence-based formal semantics. All those characteristics position NAL as an excellent candidate for modeling natural language expressions and supporting artificial agents while performing knowledge discovery and commonsense reasoning tasks. In this article, we propose a set of rules for the automatic translation of natural language (NL) text into the formal language of non-axiomatic logic (NAL). Several free available tools are used to support a previous linguistic analysis, and a common sense ontology is used to populate a background knowledge base that helps to delimit the scope and the semantics of logical formulas translated. Experimentation shows our set to be the most comprehensive NL-to-NAL translation rule set known so far. Furthermore, we included an extensive set of examples to show how our proposed set of rules can be used for translating a wide range of English statements with varying grammatical structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Motivated by results on the rationality of equivariant Hilbert series of some hierarchical models in algebraic statistics we introduce the Segre product of formal languages and apply it to establish rationality of equivariant Hilbert series in new cases. To this end we show that the Segre product of two regular languages is again regular. We also prove that every filtration of algebras given as a tensor product of families of algebras with rational equivariant Hilbert series has a rational equivariant Hilbert series. The term equivariant is used broadly to include the action of the monoid of nonnegative integers by shifting variables. Furthermore, we exhibit a filtration of shift invariant monomial algebras that has a rational equivariant Hilbert series, but whose presentation ideals do not stabilize. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Formal Language: In this essay, I reflect on the systematic exclusion of people with intellectual disabilities from philosophy even as their personhood is subject to ongoing philosophical debates. Theorizing this disenfranchisement as a form of epistemic oppression, I consider it in the context of the invalidation of disabled perspectives more broadly and characteristics of knowledge-production that confer credibility in philosophy. I end with a call for transformation through the framework of disability justice. I include an Easy Read summary, a plain language companion, and discussion questions, which restate my argument in simplified language and invite dialogue, demonstrating how philosophy might resist epistemic gatekeeping and imagine knowledge-production otherwise. Plain Language: This essay is about philosophy and intellectual disability (ID). People with ID do not get to do philosophy very much. Some reasons they are left out are: – Disabled people are not believed when they talk about their lives. – The way we write in philosophy makes it hard for people with ID to join. I think we should change how we do philosophy. I wrote a summary that is easy to read. I wrote questions to talk about together. I want to think about how to do philosophy better. Easy Read Summary: Philosophers are thinkers. They think about how the world is and how it should be. They think about intellectual disability (ID). Some thinkers say people with intellectual disabilities (ID) are worth less than other people. Most people with intellectual disabilities (ID) do not get to say what they think. We can change how we think by including people with intellectual disabilities (ID). We can believe what people with intellectual disabilities (ID) say about their lives. We can write and speak in simple ways. We can give people help thinking and making decisions. We can include people who do not speak or write. We can think as a community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines how the Chinese government has adopted authoritarian digital populism to justify its political programs through its official social media sub-accounts. Through discourse analysis, we investigate textual material concerning the "Belt and Road Initiative" (BRI) posted on a representative WeChat account, Xiakedao. We find Xiakedao performing digital populism through stylistic-emotional manipulation to portray the benefits of the BRI to China, BRI countries, and the world, or, put succinctly, to legitimize the BRI. Specifically, in 2014–2016, through mixing informal and formal language, Xiakedao based its legitimization on stirring up a sense of hegemonic superiority by painting it as a strategy capable of significantly advancing China's interests. Since 2017, Xiakedao has shifted to emphasizing its massive global contribution to stimulate nationalist pride and exploiting a trauma complex to bestow a counter-hegemonic aura on it. Drawing on Laclau and Mouffe's discourse theory, we argue that Xiakedao has utilized the terms "China" and "BRI" as an empty signifier and a floating signifier, respectively. We unravel its discursive strategies of fixing their meanings and (re)drawing antagonistic frontiers to legitimize the BRI during different periods. The study contributes to theoretically understanding how an authoritarian state legitimizes the same political programs from disparate stances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ends of these phrases also provide the verse-final rhyme-word, which usually has the metrical form (- - //), matching the quantitative meter of the ultimate metrical feet in surrounding verses. The rhyme-words of the verses adjacent to 50:8 in this passage are the following: I al-majid i (v. 1), I ajib i (v. 2), I ba id i (v. 3), I afi i (v. 4), I marij i (v. 5), I furuj i (v. 6), I bahij i (v. 7), I al- a id i (v. 9), I na id i (v. 10), and I al-khuruj i (v. 11). Rhyme and meter, the key constraints of poetry, have a profound effect on the structures that can be used within verses. V. 36 is preceded by the verse-final rhyme words I kabira i and I khabira i (4:34-35), and v. 107 is preceded by the verse-final rhyme words I akima i , I kha ima i , and I ra ima i (4:104-6), all of which exhibit the quantitative metrical form (/ - - //). Because the singular is I a jaf i (masc.)/ I ajfa i (fem.), the expected plural would be I ujf i , like other adjectives of the form I af al, fa la i describing defects, such as I a ma i (masc. sing.), I amya i (fem. sing.), "blind", which takes the plural I umy i . [Extracted from the article]

For each class in the piecewise-local subregular hierarchy, a relativized (tier-based) variant is defined. Algebraic as well as automata-, language-, and model-theoretic characterizations are provided for each of these relativized classes, except in cases where this is provably impossible. These various characterizations are necessarily intertwined due to the well-studied logic-automaton connection and the relationship between finite-state automata and (syntactic) semigroups. Closure properties of each class are demonstrated by using automata-theoretic methods to provide constructive proofs for the closures that do hold and giving language-theoretic counterexamples for those that do not. The net result of all of this is that, rather than merely existing as an operationally-defined parallel set of classes, these relativized variants integrate cleanly with the other members of the piecewise-local subregular hierarchy from every perspective. Relativization may even prove useful in the characterization of star-free, as every star-free stringset is the preprojection of another (also star-free) stringset whose syntactic semigroup is not a monoid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A classic result in formal language theory is the equivalence among noncounting, or aperiodic, regular languages, and languages defined through star-free regular expressions, or first-order logic. Past attempts to extend this result beyond the realm of regular languages have met with difficulties: for instance it is known that star-free tree languages may violate the non-counting property and there are aperiodic tree languages that cannot be defined through first-order logic. We extend such classic equivalence results to a significant family of deterministic contextfree languages, the operator-precedence languages (OPL), which strictly includes the widely investigated visibly pushdown, alias input-driven, family and other structured context-free languages. The OP model originated in the '60s for defining programming languages and is still used by high performance compilers; its rich algebraic properties have been investigated initially in connection with grammar learning and recently completed with further closure properties and with monadic second order logic definition. We introduce an extension of regular expressions, the OP-expressions (OPE) which define the OPLs and, under the star-free hypothesis, define first-order definable and non-counting OPLs. Then, we prove, through a fairly articulated grammar transformation, that aperiodic OPLs are first-order definable. Thus, the classic equivalence of star-freeness, aperiodicity, and first-order definability is established for the large and powerful class of OPLs. We argue that the same approach can be exploited to obtain analogous results for visibly pushdown languages too. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Variable-length codes are the bases of the free submonoids of a free monoid. There are some important longstanding open questions about the structure of finite maximal codes, namely the factorization conjecture and the triangle conjecture, proposed by Perrin and Schützenberger. The latter concerns finite codes Y which are subsets of a* Ba*, where a is a letter and B is an alphabet not containing a. A structural property of finite maximal codes has recently been shown by Zhang and Shum. It exhibits a relationship between finite maximal codes and factorizations of cyclic groups. With the aim of highlighting the links between this result and other older ones on maximal and factorizing codes, we give a simpler and a new proof of this result. As a consequence, we prove that for any finite maximal code X ⊆ (B ∪{a})* containing the word apq, where p, q are prime numbers, X ∩ a* Ba* satisfies the triangle conjecture. Let n be a positive integer that is a product of at most two prime numbers. We also prove that it is decidable whether a finite code Y ∪ an ⊆ a* Ba* ∪ a* is included in a finite maximal code and that, if this holds, Y ⊆ an is included in a code that also satisfies the factorization conjecture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Petri nets, also known as vector addition systems, are a long established model of concurrency with extensive applications in modeling and analysis of hardware, software, and database systems, as well as chemical, biological, and business processes. The central algorithmic problem for Petri nets is reachability: whether from the given initial configuration there exists a sequence of valid execution steps that reaches the given final configuration. The complexity of the problem has remained unsettled since the 1960s, and it is one of the most prominent open questions in the theory of verification. Decidability was proved by Mayr in his seminal STOC 1981 work, and, currently, the best published upper bound is non-primitive recursive Ackermannian of Leroux and Schmitz from Symposium on Logic in Computer Science 2019. We establish a non-elementary lower bound, i.e., that the reachability problem needs a tower of exponentials of time and space. Until this work, the best lower bound has been exponential space, due to Lipton in 1976. The new lower bound is a major breakthrough for several reasons. Firstly, it shows that the reachability problem is much harder than the coverability (i.e., state reachability) problem, which is also ubiquitous but has been known to be complete for exponential space since the late 1970s. Secondly, it implies that a plethora of problems from formal languages, logic, concurrent systems, process calculi, and other areas, which are known to admit reductions from the Petri nets reachability problem, are also not elementary. Thirdly, it makes obsolete the current best lower bounds for the reachability problems for two key extensions of Petri nets: with branching and with a pushdown stack. We develop a construction that uses arbitrarily large pairs of values with ratio R to provide zero testable counters that are bounded by R. At the heart of our proof is then a novel gadget, the so-called factorial amplifier that, assuming availability of counters that are zero testable and bounded by k, guarantees to produce arbitrarily large pairs of values whose ratio is exactly the factorial of k. Repeatedly composing the factorial amplifier with itself by means of the former construction enables us to compute, in linear time, Petri nets that simulate Minsky machines whose counters are bounded by a tower of exponentials, which yields the non-elementary lower bound. By refining this scheme further, we, in fact, already establish hardness for h-exponential space for Petri nets with h + 13 counters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The document is a summary of the journal article "Selected Papers from Datalog 2.0 2022" published in the Theory & Practice of Logic Programming. The article discusses the 4th International Workshop on the Resurgence of Datalog in Academia and Industry (Datalog 2.0 2022), which aimed to bring together researchers, implementors, and users of Datalog. The workshop received a significant number of submissions, and 21 papers were accepted for publication. The article also highlights the inclusion of an invited talk by Reinhard Pichler and emphasizes the collaborative and vibrant nature of the Datalog community. The document concludes by expressing anticipation for the future contributions and innovations in Datalog research. [Extracted from the article]

This article introduces two new approaches in the areas of lexical analysis and context-free parsing. We present an extension, MGLL, of generalised parsing which allows multiple input strings to be parsed together efficiently, and we present an enhanced approach to lexical analysis which exploits this multiple parsing capability. The work provides new power to formal language specification and disambiguation, and brings new techniques into the historically well-studied areas of lexical and syntax analysis. It encompasses characterlevel parsing at one extreme and the classical LEX/YACC style division at the other, allowing the advantages of both approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines two alleged limitations in the use of formal languages: on the one hand, the trade-offs between expressive and inferential power, and on the other, the phenomenon of system imprisonment. After reconceptualizing the issue, we consider the role played by modality in the understanding of certain aspects of mathematical structures, and argue for its centrality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, the emerging technologies have been constantly shaping the education domain, especially the use of artificial intelligence (AI) for language learning, which has attracted significant attention. Many of the AI tools are being used for learning foreign languages, in both formal and informal ways. There are many studies that have explored the potential of the recent technology "ChatGPT" for education and learning languages, but none of the existing studies have conducted any exploratory study for assessing the usability of ChatGPT. This paper conducts an assessment for usability of ChatGPT for formal English language learning. The study uses a standard questionnaire-based approach to ask participants about their feedback for usefulness and effectiveness of ChatGPT. The participants were asked for their feedback after performing series of tasks related to formal English language learning with ChatGPT. A variety of student participants were selected for this study with diverse English language proficiency levels, education levels, and nationalities. The quantitative analysis of the participant responses shed light on their experience with regards to the usability of ChatGPT for performing different English language learning tasks such as conversation, writing, grammar, and vocabulary. The findings from this study are quite promising and indicate that ChatGPT is an effective tool to be used for formal English language learning. Overall, this study contributes to the fast-growing research domain on using emerging technologies for formal English language learning by conducting in-depth assessment of usability for ChatGPT in formal English language learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We contribute to the refined understanding of language-logic-algebra interplay in a recent algebraic framework over countable words. Algebraic characterizations of the one variable fragment of FO as well as the boolean closure of the existential fragment of FO are established. We develop a seamless integration of the block product operation in the countable setting, and generalize well-known decompositional characterizations of FO and its two variable fragment. We propose an extension of FO admitting infinitary quantifiers to reason about inherent infinitary properties of countable words, and obtain a natural hierarchical block-product based characterization of this extension. Properties expressible in this extension can be simultaneously expressed in the classical logical systems such as WMSO and FO[cut]. We also rule out the possibility of a finite-basis for a block-product based characterization of these logical systems. Finally, we report algebraic characterizations of one variable fragments of the hierarchies of the new extension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Service choreographies are a versatile approach for building service-based distributed systems. Many approaches can be found in the literature tackling different aspects of service choreographies, such as choreography realizability and conformance checking, distributed coordination, formal choreographic languages, and scalability. As of today, choreography scalability has not been specifically addressed through approaches that also consider coordination issues while still decoupling these two related aspects. Scalability is one of the most important properties to be considered when building distributed systems. It enhances the user-perceived performances and influences the overall dependability of the system. In particular, load scalability allows distributed service-oriented systems to effectively handle varying loads without suffering performance degradation. In this direction, microservice-based systems are able to scale thanks to the possibility of replicating those microservices exposed to growing loads, distributing their workload among different instances. By leveraging on our experience in coordinating service choreographies, in this paper, we propose a layered architectural style that allows to realize scalable microservice-oriented choreographies. The architecture integrates a fully-distributed coordination layer capable of ensuring the correct interactions and a load-balancing layer that allows to balance of coordinated requests. We discuss the properties of the proposed architectural style and evaluate its benefits on user-perceived performances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chan monks had a language problem. They needed to deal with at least four registers; the language of the street in their district, the Chan koine with its colloquialisms and argot, the guanhua or official language, and the elite formal language in Literary Sinitic that was packed with allusions. Zen monks in Japan had to deal with registers of Japanese, plus the Chan koine and the formal Literary Chinese. One response was philological, glosses on vocabulary that were likely to be misunderstood, such as dialect words and words that had changed meaning over time. Notably, most of these responses originated in or were connected to the greater Hangzhou region and its Wu language. After discussing whether there was a "standard" or common language used by elites throughout China, this article contends that the awareness of language differences between the "standard" or Mandarin Chinese and the Wu language by native Wu speakers contributed to the rise of Chan philology and then Zen philology. A few key examples of specialized Chan philological texts will be examined, but it should be kept in mind that examples of Chan philology may be embedded in other Chan works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents a demarcation of a “minimalistic” concept of logical form, which nevertheless largely agrees with the way the term “logical form” is commonly used in contemporary logic and philosophy of logic. We see logical forms as formulas of formal languages assigned to (compounds of) sentences of a natural language (perhaps modulo notational variance). We thus reject the views of logical forms as underlying structures of thoughts or of the material reality that surrounds us. The assignment of the forms, we claim, aims at envisaging the logical (especially inferential) properties of the analyzed sentences, arguments, or other texts, as the analyzing formulas wear them, as it were, on their sleeves. Hence we suggest an “expressivist” and a pragmatic understanding of logical forms - they are used to expose (and fix) logical properties of sentences in textual contexts and the way of their employment is determined by the goals of the particular studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Alustath is the property of Republic of Iraq Ministry of Higher Education & Scientific Research (MOHESR) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper looks at cross-cultural variation in corporate communication over the pandemic, focusing on the language adopted by rail companies in the UK and Italy to enhance trust in safety and highlighting how they engage in communicative action with potential passengers and other online users. The analysis shows that UK companies generally prefer personal forms of self-mention and avoid technicisms, while Italian companies adopt more formal language and more impersonal forms of self-representation. Common elements seem to be related to repeated communicative functions, and the semantic elements they involve, thus highlighting the close link between pragmatic units and lexico-grammatical patterns (with their semantics), as well as the interplay between meaning, dialogic action and context in communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

First, the wide applicability of the relevance-theoretic pragmatic account of how new (ad hoc) senses of words and new (ad hoc) words arise spontaneously in communication/comprehension is demonstrated. The lexical pragmatic processes of meaning modulation and metonymy are shown to apply equally to simple words, noun to verb ‘conversions’, and morphologically complex cases with non-compositional (atomic) meanings. Second, this pragmatic account is situated within a specific view of the cognitive architecture of language and communication, with the formal side of language, its recursive combinatorial system, argued to have different developmental, evolutionary and cognitive characteristics from the meaning side of language, which is essentially pragmatic/ communicative. Words straddle the form/meaning (syntax/pragmatics) divide: on the one hand, they are phrasal structures, consisting of a root and variable numbers of functors, with no privileged status in the syntax; on the other hand, they are salient to language users as basic units of communication and are stored as such, in a communication lexicon, together with their families of related senses, which originated as cases of pragmatically derived (ad hoc) senses but have become established, due to their communicative efficacy and frequency of use. Third, in an attempt to find empirical evidence for the proposed linguistic form- meaning divide, two very different cases of atypical linguistic and communicative development are considered: autistic children and deaf children who develop Homesign. The morpho-syntax (the formal side of language) appears to unfold in much the same way in both cases and is often not much different from that of typically developing children, but they diverge markedly from each other in their communication/pragmatics and their development of a system (a lexicon) of meaningful words/signs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The assembly of products or components by operators in industries is a complex task with recurring problems. In these processes, operators often make errors that can lead to defective products. Therefore, they need to be inspected later to verify their correct assembly. The main problems are caused by several reasons including high employee turnover, lack of experience in manufacturing specific products or confusion in interpreting instructions to assemble similar components. In this paper, a novel structured language aimed to describe the required actions to manufacture a product in industrial assembly environments is presented. The main contribution is to provide a formal language to feed automatic systems that can verify through visual control whether the actions performed by the operator are carried out following the standard described by this language. In general, the use of this formal language will allow to minimize the negative impact of errors during assembly and to reduce waste in many forms in the industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the cognitive revolution, language and action have been compared as cognitive systems, with cross-domain convergent views recently gaining renewed interest in biology, neuroscience, and cognitive science. Language and action are both combinatorial systems whose mode of combination has been argued to be hierarchical, combining elements into constituents of increasingly larger size. This structural similarity has led to the suggestion that they rely on shared cognitive and neural resources. In this article, we compare the conceptual and formal properties of hierarchy in language and action using set theory. We show that the strong compositionality of language requires a particular formalism, a magma, to describe the algebraic structure corresponding to the set of hierarchical structures underlying sentences. When this formalism is applied to actions, it appears to be both too strong and too weak. To overcome these limitations, which are related to the weak compositionality and sequential nature of action structures, we formalize the algebraic structure corresponding to the set of actions as a trace monoid. We aim to capture the different system properties of language and action in terms of the distinction between hierarchical sets and hierarchical sequences and discuss the implications for the way both systems could be represented in the brain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although logical settings are typically concerned with tracking alethic considerations, frameworks exist in which topic-theoretic considerations—e.g., tracking subject-matter or topic—are given equal importance. Intuitions about extending topic through a propositional language are generally straightforward for extensional cases. For a number of reasons, arriving at a compelling account of the subject-matter of intensional operators—such as intensional conditionals—is a more difficult task. In particular, the framework of topic-sensitive intentional modals (TSIMs) championed by Francesco Berto and his collaborators leave the topics of intensional formulae undefined, which artificially constricts the expressivity of the theory. This paper proposes an approach to fill in this lacuna, emphasizing an analogous problem in Parry-style containment logics. In this setting, the approach receives a proof-of-concept through the introduction of a natural and general family of subsystems of Parry's PAI —with sound and complete axiomatizations—that allow a fine degree of control over the topics of intensional conditionals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A dynamic view of the evolution of the infections of SARS‐CoV‐2 in Catalonia using a Digital Twin approach that forecasts the true infection curve is presented. The forecast model incorporates the vaccination process, the confinement, and the detection rate, and virtually allows to consider any nonpharmaceutical intervention, enabling to understand their effects on the disease's containment while forecasting the trend of the pandemic. A continuous validation process of the model is performed using real data and an optimization model that automatically provides information regarding the effects of the containment actions on the population. To simplify this validation process, a formal graphical language that simplifies the interaction with the different specialists and an easy modification of the model parameters are used. The Digital Twin of the pandemic in Catalonia provides a forecast of the future trend of the SARS‐CoV‐2 spread and information regarding the true cases and effectiveness of the NPIs to control the SARS‐CoV‐2 spread over the population. This approach can be applied easily to other regions and can become an excellent tool for decision‐making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a unified formal framework, Formal Framework For FLUID (F3FLUID), for the development of safety‐critical interactive systems. This framework is based on the Formal Language of User Interface Design (FLUID) pivot modeling language defined in the FORMEDICIS project, which enables high‐level system requirements for interactive systems to be specified in the FLUID language. This modeling language is specifically designed for handling concepts of safety‐critical interactive systems, including domain knowledge. A FLUID model is used as a source model for the generation of several target models in different modeling languages to support the formal verification methods, such as theorem proving and model checking. In this paper, we use the Event‐B modeling language for checking functional behaviors, user interactions, safety properties, and domain properties. A FLUID model is transformed into an Event‐B model, and then, the Rodin tool is used to check the internal consistency with respect to the given safety properties. We illustrate the operational semantics of the FLUID language, and the transformation strategy of FLUID models into Event‐B models, including the tool development. We use the ProB model checker to analyze the temporal properties and to animate the formalized specification. In addition, an interactive cooperative objects (ICOs) model is derived from the Event‐B model for animation, visualization and validation of dynamic behaviors, visual properties, and task analysis. Finally, an industrial case study, complying with the ARINC 661 standard, Multi‐Purpose Interactive Applications (MPIA), is used to illustrate the effectiveness of our F3FLUID framework for the development of safety‐critical interactive systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Biotechnologie, Agronomie, Societe et Environnement is the property of Les Presses Agronomiques de Gembloux and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

We introduce a meta-model based on formal languages, dubbed formal choreographic languages, to study message-passing systems. Our framework allows us to generalise standard constructions from the literature and to compare them. In particular, we consider notions such as global view, local view, and projections from the former to the latter. The correctness of local views projected from global views is characterised in terms of a closure property. We consider a number of communication properties -such as (dead)lock-freedom- and give conditions on formal choreographic languages to guarantee them. Finally, we show how formal choreographic languages can capture existing formalisms; specifically we consider communicating finite-state machines, choreography automata, and multiparty session types. Notably, formal choreographic languages, differently from most approaches in the literature, can naturally model systems exhibiting non-regular behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Catalonia, the largest group of immigrants is that of Moroccan origin. Some Moroccan women are conditioned by a traditional family model that is concretised by the spatial separation between men and women in all spheres of society, a fact that influences the socialisation of these women and that, in a migratory context, may have an impact on their early abandonment of formal second language courses. Accordingly, this study aims to analyse the importance of accounting for the culture and gender factors in language teaching in a migratory context. We conducted semi-structured interviews with eight teachers of Catalan and Spanish as a second language, as they are the link between the institution and the students. The results suggest that providing instruction to segregated groups might grant women who are unable to participate in mixed-gender language classes the opportunity to increase their second language proficiency and thus facilitate their integration into the corresponding host territory. Offering gender-specific courses is a particular challenge for public L2 schools, where groups are organised according to the learners' levels and not according to characteristics linked to origin and gender, as the latter practice may be at odds with the criteria of equality that guide public education in the host territory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Estudios Pedagogicos (Valdivia) is the property of Estudios Pedagogicos and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Apuntes Universitarios: Revista de Investigación is the property of Universidad Peruana Union Filiar Tarapoto and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

A new technique and its software implementation are presented to create a deeply semantically structured ontology using plain natural language text as input, without regular structure or any previous tagging and markup. The new approach is primarily aimed at highly inflectional languages, and is implemented for Ukrainian. The automatically created ontologies (in OWL) could be easily converted to other graph databases formats, such as Neo4j, and were successfully evaluated as valid ontologies using Protégé, RDFlib and Neo4j environments. An integrated approach is proposed for the development of natural language dialogue systems driven by the ontologyrelated graph database using the Cypher language for the formal queries. The original phrases are subject to a special method of semantic analysis, which determines the type of formal query to the database. The essence of the analysis is that the text of the user’s phrase goes through a series of checks. Based on their results, a set of basic templates for the formal requests are determined, as well as additional constructions that are attached to the basic template. Some of the checks may also return the notion of substitution to certain specified positions of the formal query. Formal queries can return both contexts and lists of ontology concepts. In addition to concepts, queries can also return information about specific semantic predicates that connect them, which simplifies the synthesis of natural language responses. The synthesis of answers is based on special templates, the choice of which is directly related to the corresponding template of the formal query. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]