Several solutions to describing service choreography have emerged, mainly focused on encoding capabilities of services especially for those deployed on the Web. These solutions are either derived from traditional Web service standards such as WSDL or inspired by the theory of process calculus. Little attention has however been paid to finding a lightweight solution which can enable peers to obtain, publish and share service choreography in an open environment or peer-to-peer network. This paper proposes a framework for choreographing semantically enhanced Web Services encoded in a extended lightweight coordinative language which is derived from process calculus and is dedicated to running in modern Web browsers. A proof-of-concept prototype has been implemented and demoed as a decentralised service choreography-management platform based on this framework. There is no need for users to install any third-party application, and service choreography execution is achieved via client-side Web browsers. Also, the preliminary experiments indicate the efficiency and scalability of our proof-of-concept implementation of this framework.

Infandango1 is an open source web-based system for automated grading of Java code submitted by students. Uploaded Java files are compiled and run against a set of unit tests on a central server, with results being stored in a database. Students gain near-instant feedback on the correctness of their code, and instructors are able to monitor the progress of students in the class.

Let's start off by setting the scene for this book.A term is generally regarded as vague if it admits borderline cases, that is, cases where speakers are reluctant to say either that the term definitely applies or definitely does not apply.An example is the expression bright, say applied to lights.Although some lights are definitely bright, and others are definitely dim, there are in-between cases which seem to be neither bright nor dim.Borderline vagueness is often associated with the notion of tolerance, in the sense that small changes in objects don't affect the applicability of a vague term.Thus, suppose my sitting room light is definitely bright and I turn down the dimmer a very tiny fraction; then the light will still be regarded as bright.This principle of tolerance gives rise to a puzzling situation: If I keep on turning down the dimmer, small step by small step, the diminution in brightness will be imperceptible at each step.Thus, if the light is bright at step n, then tolerance dictates that it will also be bright at step n + 1.Yet inevitably at some stage in this process the light will no longer be bright-indeed, it might be entirely extinguished.Situations like this are often discussed under the heading of the sorites paradox.Kees van Deemter has contributed several insightful papers to the literature on vagueness, and he would have been well placed to write a technical monograph on the subject.Instead, he has taken the brave step of producing a book for the general public, following in the 'popular science' footsteps of such luminaries as Richard Dawkins.In general, he has succeeded admirably.I'm not sure whether I would recommend giving this book to your grandmother, but van Deemter's informal style, vivid examples, and lucid exposition make it a pleasure to read.A number of themes recur throughout the book: How does vagueness function in communication and why is it so prevalent?Are there situations in which vague terms are preferable to precise ones?And what is the relation between vagueness and context-dependence?Framed by an introduction and epilogue, the twelve chapters of the book that explore these themes are divided into three parts.Part I makes a case for the pervasiveness of vagueness, even "where one least expects it," such as in scientific measurement.Chapter 2 contains an interesting excursus on how apparently clearcut notions such as 'species' become more indeterminate on closer inspection, and Chapter 3 points out that attempts to turn vague terms such as obesity, poverty, and intelligence into precisely defined notions suitable for scientific investigation are subject to arbitrariness and residual vagueness.Examples of gradual change in the identity of individuals are addressed in Chapter 4, and issues of numerical approximation, rounding, round numbers, and levels of statistical significance appear in Chapter 5.

Godot is a mobile robot platform that serves as a testbed for the interface between a sophisticated low-level robot navigation and a symbolic high-level spoken dialogue system. The interesting feature of this combined system is that information flows in two directions: (1) the navigation system. supplies landmark; information from the cognitive map used for the interpretation of the user's utterances in the dialogue system; and (2) the semantic content of utterances analysed by the dialogue system are used to adjust probabilities about the robot's position in the navigation system.

The paper develops a constraint-based theory of prosodic phrasing and prominence, based on an HPSG framework, with an implementation in ALE. Prominence and juncture are represented by n-ary branching metrical trees. The general aim is to define prosodic structures recursively, in parallel with the definition of syntactic structures. We address a number of prima facie problems arising from the discrepancy between syntactic and prosodic structure

To verify hardware designs by model checking, circuit specifications are commonly expressed in the temporal logic CTL. Automatic conversion of English to CTL requires the definition of an appropriately restricted subset of English. We show how the limited semantic expressibility of CTL can be exploited to derive a hierarchy of subsets. Our strategy avoids potential difficulties with approaches that take existing computational semantic analyses of English as their starting point---such as the need to ensure that all sentences in the subset possess a CTL translation.

Abstract This paper describes an experimental interactive graphics interface, GRAFLOG, in which drawings receive linguistic interpretations. It is possible to emulate linguistic interaction in situations where graphics is thought to be necessary. The paper presents examples of such a kind of dialogue and the architecture of the implementation. The paper explains how representations of drawings can be constructed by treating graphical symbols as “objects”, and how a parallel linguistic interpretation for these symbols can be constructed. It highlights the relevance of “deictic expressions” and “spatial prepositions” in building the interface mechanisms between these two kinds of representations. Lastly, it shows how a reasoning component is constructed for making deductions from premises that are found in both the graphical and linguistic domains. Using GRAFLOG, it is possible to represent knowledge through words and pictures. GRAFLOG is implemented, using an object oriented programming style, in PROLOG and GKS.