Abstract The idea that discourse relations are interpreted both by explicit content and by shared knowledge between producer and interpreter is pervasive in discourse and linguistic studies. How much weight should be ascribed in this process to the lexical semantics of the arguments is, however, uncertain. We propose a computational approach to analyze contrast and concession relations in the PDTB corpus. Our work sheds light on the question of how much lexical relations contribute to the signaling of such explicit and implicit relations, as well as on the contribution of different parts of speech to these semantic relations. This study contributes to bridging the gap between corpus and computational linguistics by proposing transparent and explainable computational models of discourse relations based on the synonymy and antonymy of their arguments.

The recent development of a new kind of public transportation system relies on a particular double-steering kinematic structure enhancing maneuverability in cluttered environments such as downtown areas. We call bi-steerable car a vehicle showing this kind of kinematics. Endowed with autonomy capacities, the bi-steerable car ought to combine suitably and safely a set of abilities: simultaneous localisation and environment modelling, motion planning and motion execution amidst moderately dynamic obstacles. In this paper we address the integration of these four essential autonomy abilities into a single application. Specifically, we aim at reactive execution of planned motion. We address the fusion of controls issued from the control law and the obstacle avoidance module using probabilistic techniques.

The recent development of a new kind of public transportation system relies on a particular double-steering kinematic structure enhancing maneuverability in cluttered environments such as downtown areas. We call bi-steerable car a vehicle showing this kind of kinematics. We present experimental results, from map-building to trajectory tracking, aiming at validating the theoretical considerations obtained recently for the general bi-steerable system. These results are a first step towards the motion autonomy of this kind of transportation system.

The Cycab robot is a new mobile platform already used in several research labs and meant for different applications such as public transportation in airport terminals, self-service cars in pedestrian zones, etc. From a kinematic point of view, the Cycab specificity is the turning of its rear wheels as a linear function of the steering angle of the front wheels. This feature enhances the maneuverability of the Cycab in cluttered environments. However, the associated kinematic model is new and different from the ones commonly treated in the robotics literature (such as the car-like, tractor-trailer, etc). To our knowledge such a system has not yet been studied and especially, there is no existing motion planner for this system. We tackle the study of this new nonholonomic system, by establishing its kinematic model and proving its differential flatness property. From this study we deduce a first motion planner for the system.