Books published by College Publications

Automata and Dictionaries is aimed at students and specialists in natural language processing and related disciplines where efficient text analysis plays a role. Large linguistic resources, in particular lexica, are now recognized as a fundamental pre-requisite for all natural language processing tasks. Specialists in this domain cannot afford to be ignorant of the state-of-the-art lexicon-management algorithms. This monograph, which is also intended be used as an advanced text book in computational linguistics, fills a gap in natural language processing monographs and is complementary to other publications in this area.This book is also a source of examples, exercises and problems for software engineering in general. The algorithms that are presented are excellent examples of non-trivial problems of graph construction, graph handling and graph traversal. Even though published in scientific journals, they have not been presented in an easily accessible form so far to teachers and students. These algorithms will also be of interest for the training of software engineers.Chapter 1 of Automata and Dictionaries provides the application-oriented motivation for solving the problems studied in the rest of the book. It introduces and exemplifies several key notions of lexicon-based natural language processing in a way accessible to any computer science student. Chapter 2 surveys the main solutions of the problem, using as an example a very small toy lexicon. Chapter 3 defines the underlying mathematical notions, immediately illustrating theory with practical examples, which makes this part quite readable.Chapters 4 and 5 are dedicated to the two central notions of lexicon construction: the algorithms of determinization and minimization. The standard form of both algorithms is presented, but also their variants and some special cases that occur frequently in practice. The operation of the algorithms is described step by step in examples, introducing the beginner into the world of epsilon-transitions, state heights and reverse automata.Chapter 6 goes a step further into complexity. It is based on algorithms published by scholars from 1998 to now. They are presented here with the same clarity as the preceding, more classical, algorithms. This remarkable achievement owes much to the rigorous structuration of this chapter. These algorithms have variants for transducers, which are presented in Chapter 7 with the same pedagogical skill.The last chapter studies time and space complexity of the algorithms and explains several tricks useful to speed up their operation.

This volume is a collection of papers that explore various areas of common interest between philosophy, computing, and cognition. The book illustrates the rich intrigue of this fascinating recent intellectual story. It begins by providing a new analysis of the ideas related to computer ethics, such as the role in information technology of the so-called moral mediators, the relationship between intelligent machines and warfare, and the new opportunities offered by telepresnece, for example in teaching and learning. The book also ties together the concerns of epistemology and logic, showing, for example, the connections between computers, bio-robotics, and scientific research and between computational programs and scientific discovery. Important results coming from recent computational models of deduction, the dynamic nature of meaning, and the role of reasoning and learning in spatial, visual and exemplar-based compuational frameworks are also addressed. Some stimulating papers carefully study how the interplay between computing and philosophy has also shed new light on the role of rational acceptance in the logic of belief and on the status of old philosophical topics like embodiment and consciousness, the role of information and the problem of realism in the new digital world. Finally, a considerable part of the book addresses the role of intenal and external representations in scientific reasoning and creative inferences as well as the place of manipulation of objects and artifacts in human cognition. Taking these topics together this book describes an aspect of an emerging agenda which is likely to carry the interaction between philosophy, cognition and computing forward into the twenty-first century. The volume is based on the papers that were presented at the International European Conference Computing and Philosophy, E-CAP2004, Italy, held at the University of Paiva, Paiv, Italy in June 2004, chaired by Lorenzo Magnani.

This book is dedicated to the memory of Hughes Leblanc whose work was influential in many fields of philosophical logic, including especially truth-value (substitutional) semantics, probabilistic interpretations for classical and intuitionistic logic and natural deduction. In 1970, Hughes joined with 23 other philosophers and logicians attending a conference in Montréal to found the Society for Exact Philosophy. The papers collected in this volume derive from the program of the annual meeting of the Society for Exact Philosophy held at the Université de Montréal in 2001. All of the papers are in the spirit of Hughes' work: to explore and try to solve philosophical problems in a sound and systematic way, with the help of formal logico-mathematical tools.

Recent advances in philosophy, artificial intelligence,mathematical psychology, and the decision sciences havebrought a renewed focus to the role and interpretation ofprobability in theories of uncertain reasoning. Henry E.Kyburg, Jr. has long resisted the now dominate Bayesianapproach to the role of probability in scientific inference andpractical decision. The sharp contrasts between theBayesian approach and Kyburg's program offer a uniquelypowerful framework within which to study several issues atthe heart of scientific inference, decision, and reasoningunder uncertainty.The commissioned essays for this volume take measure of the scope and impact of Kyburg's views on probability and scientific inference, and include several new and importantcontributions to the field. Contributors:Gert de Cooman,Clark Glymour,William Harper,Isaac Levi,Ron Loui,Enrique Miranda,John Pollock,Teddy Seidenfeld,Choh Man Teng,Mariam Thalos,Gregory Wheeler,Jon Williamson, andHenry E. Kyburg, Jr.

The present volume is dedicated to aspects of algorithmic work inbioinformatics and computational biology with an emphasis on stringalgorithms that play a central role in the analysis of biologicalsequences. The papers included are a selection of articlescorresponding to talks given at one of two meetings sponsored by TheRoyal Society, the UK's national academy of science, under grantno.: JEB/KOREAN Networks/16715. The grant supported two workshopsorganised by researches from the Seoul National University (Korea)and King's College London (UK). The first workshop was held inSeoul, Korea, in July 2004 and the second meeting took place inLondon, UK, in February 2005 as part of the annual LondonStringology Days.

Modal logic is one of the most widely applied logical formalisms. Systems ofmodal logic are being used in many disciplines, ranging from artificialintelligence, computer science, mathematics, formal grammar and semantics tophilosophy. This volume presents substantial recent advances in the relationaland the algorithmic treatment of modal logics. It contains papers from thefifth conference on "Advances in Modal logic," held in Manchester (UK) inSeptember 2004. Written by leading experts in the field, the present book isindispensable for any advanced student and researcher in pure and applied modallogic.

This collection of essays in honor of Prof. Stig Andur Pedersen's 60th Birthdayspans over a broad scope of topics, ranging from mathematical modelling overrealism in philosophy of science to an analysis of apology after medicalmistakes. The unusually broad range is a fair but still inadequate reflectionof the work of Stig Andur Pedersen, a philosopher and scientist whose range ofinterests, abilities and production is itself unusually broad.

Cette nouvelle édition contient de nouveaux chapitres pour les élèves de licence, où la progression est volontairement lente et chaque étape est expliquée. Le chapitre sur le tri par interclassement a été réécrit pour plus de clarté et de nouveaux résultats ont été inclus. Un grand chapitre sur XSLT a été ajouté.Ce livre s'adresse a priori à différents publics dont l'intérêtcommun est la programmation fonctionnelle.Pour les étudiants de licence, nous offrons une introduction très progressive à la programmation fonctionnelle, en proposant de longs développements sur les algorithmes sur les piles et quelques types d'arbres binaires. Nous abordons aussi l'étude de l'allocation mémoire à travers la synonymie (partage dynamique de données), le rôle de la pile de contrôle et du tas, le glanage automatique de cellules (GC), l'optimisation des appels terminaux et le calcul de la mémoire totale allouée. Avec le langage fonctionnel Erlang, nous approfondissons les sujets de la transformation de programme vers la forme terminale, les fonctions d'ordre supérieur et le style avec continuations. Une technique de traduction de petits programmes fonctionnels vers Java est aussi présentée.Pour les étudiants de master, nous associons à tous les programmes fonctionnels l'analyse mathématique détaillée de leur coût (efficacité) minimum et maximum, mais aussi moyen et amorti. La particularité de notre approche est que nos outils mathématiques sont élémentaires (analyse réelle, induction, dénombrement) et nous recherchons systématiquement des encadrements explicites de façon à déduire des équivalences asymptotiques. Par ailleurs, nous couvrons en détail des preuves formelles de propriétés, comme la correction, la terminaison et l'équivalence.Pour les professionnels qui ne connaissent pas les langages fonctionnels et qui doivent apprendre à programmer avec le langage XSLT, nous proposons une introduction à XSLT qui s'appuie directement sur la partie dédiée aux étudiants de licence. La raison de ce choix didactique inhabituel repose sur le constat que XSLT est rarement enseigné à l'université ou dans les écoles d'ingénieurs, donc les programmeurs qui n'ont pas été familiarisés à la programmation fonctionnelle font face aux deux défis d'apprendre un nouveau paradigme et d'employer XML pour programmer: alors que le premier met en avant la récursivité, le second l'obscurcit à cause de la verbosité intrinsèque à XML. En apprenant d'abord un langage fonctionnel abstrait, puis XML, nous espérons favoriser un transfert de compétence vers la conception et la réalisation en XSLT sans intermédiaire.

The papers that constitute the present volume are a result of the interface between logic and knowledge where flow of information, agentivity, and the dialogical approach interweave in new and exciting ways in the context of what van Benthem calls the dynamic turn. Moreover one can read the present volume as providing different complementary variations and perspectives that should motivate and render future new cross-fertilizing dialogues between explicit epistemic and dialogical approaches. Indeed, according to this reading wecould distinguish the following pairs of interlocutors:While the paper of F. Soler-Toscano & F.R. Velázquez-Quesada and Laura Leónides explore the dynamics induced by the arrival of new information in scientific processes such as abduction by means of non-monotonic approaches to reasoning and knowledge, V. Fiutek studies the other side of the coin of non-monotonic reasoning, namely belief revision, in a dialogical setting.While the paper of P. Seban and H. van Ditmarsch develops a model theoretic semantics for a generalization of Public Announcement Logic (PAL) in order to formalize the concept of 'having the permission to say something to somebody'.S. Magnier provides the semantic basis for the dialogical perspective on multi-agent public announcement logic with common knowledge.While the paper of T. Tulenheimo explores the expressivity of interval-based temporal logic, N. Clerbout studies the expressivity of the dialogical approach in relation to a modal logic with actuality operator. Another study of the expressivity power of dialogical logic is the contribution of Fontaine and Redmond who show how the inferential properties of the standard free logics can be expressed in the dialogical framework by delving in the local meaning of the quantifiers.The papers of C. Barés Gómez and of Aude Popek present a new feature of the dynamic turn, namely its sensitivity and ability to deal with historic studies such as the study of conditionals in Ugaritic language and the reconstruction of the medieval theory of Obligationes.

The concept of mimesis has been central to philosophical aesthetics from Aristotle to Kendall Walton: in plain terms, it highlights the links between a fictional world or a representational practice on the one hand and the real world on the other. The present collection of essays includes discussions ofits general viability and pertinence and of its historical origins, as well as detailed analyses of various relevant issues regarding literature, film, theatre, images and computer games. The individual papers offer new arguments for the specialist, yet in their sum also provide a solid and helpful survey of the current state of the debate. Contributions by P. Alward, G. Currie, D. Davies, L. Dole¿el, J. Hamilton, T. Koblí¿ek, P. Kot'átko, A. Kuzmicová, J. Levinson, A. Meskin, A. Pettersson, M. Pokorny¿, J. Robson, G. Rossholm, R. M. Sainsbury, F. Stjernberg, E. Terrone, K. Thein, A. Voltolini.