General Semantics - General Semantics General Semantics is a school of thought founded by Alfred Korzybski in about 1933 in response to his observations that most people had difficulty defining human and social discussions and problems and could almost never predictably resolve them into elements that were responsive to successful intervention or correction. In contrast, he noted that engineers could almost always successfully analyze a structural problem prospectively or a failure of structure retrospectively, and arrive at a solution which the engineers first of all could predict to work and secondly could observe to work. He found especially significant the fact that engineers had a language which helped them to do this, in mathematics. Mathematics has such properties that it appears to mimic its referents and thereby simulate or emulate.
Formal semantics of programming languages - Formal semantics of programming languages In theoretical computer science formal semantics is the field concerned with the rigorous mathematical study of the meaning of programming languages and models of computation. The formal semantics of a language is given by a mathematical model to represent the possible computations described by the language. There are several approaches to formal semantics. These include: Denotational semantics Operational semantics Axiomatic semantics Categorical semantics (also called Functorial semantics) The field of formal semantics also studies the relations between different models, the relations between different approaches to meaning, and the relation between computation and the underlying mathematical structures, from fields such as logic, set theory, model theory, category theory, etc. It has close links with other areas of computer science such as the design.
Extension (semantics) - Extension (semantics) The extension of an idea consists of the things that it applies to; it contrasts with intension. This general notion is from semantics, and has been applied to some other fields: In philosophical semantics or philosophy of language, the extension of a word, phrase, or concept is the set of things it extends to, or applies to. So the extension of the word "dog" includes all the dogs in the world: Fido, Rover, Lassie, Rex, and so on. The extension of the phrase "Wikipedia readers" includes each person who has ever read Wikipedia, including the person reading these words right now. Extension is one of the meanings of "meaning". Many philosophers argue that the meaning of a word is sometimes just the things that the.
Document Style Semantics and Specification Language - Document Style Semantics and Specification Language Document Style Semantics and Specifications Language (DSSSL) is a language for specifying stylesheets for SGML documents. It uses the Scheme programming language. It is specified by the standard ISO/IEC 10179:1996. SGML contains information in a human-readable but not very pretty format. A "stylesheet" is used to present the information stored in SGML in a more pleasing or accessible way. DSSSL can convert to a wide range of formats including RTF, HTML and LaTeX. Although compatible with any SGML, DSSSL is most often used with DocBook. In parallel with the move from SGML to XML, people are using XSL instead. However, many of the concepts used in XSL originated with DSSSL..
Denotational semantics - Denotational semantics In computer science, denotational semantics is one of the approaches to formalize the meaning of computer programs, which is semantics using knowledge of mathematics. Other approaches include axiomatic semantics and operational semantics. (See semantics of programming languages.) The field was originally developed by Christopher Strachey and Dana Scott. Denotational semantics generally makes use of the techniques of functional programming to describe computer languages, architectures and programs. The mathematics of denotational semantics is usually now formulated within domain theory. Related fields: program transformation type theory References The classic work on the subject is: Joseph E. Stoy. Denotational Semantics: The Scott-Strachey Approach to Programming Language Semantics. MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1977..
Algorithms for Recovery and Isolation Exploiting Semantics - Algorithms for Recovery and Isolation Exploiting Semantics In computer science, Algorithms for Recovery and Isolation Exploiting Semantics, or ARIES is a recovery algorithm designed to work with a no-force, steal database approach. ARIES is a popular algorithm used by IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL Server and many other database systems. Three main principles lie behind ARIES: Write ahead logging: Any change to an object is first recorded in the log, and the log must be written to stable storage before changes to the object is written to disk. Repeating history during Redo: On restart after a crash, ARIES retraces the actions of a database before the crash and brings the system back to the exact state that it was in before the crash. Then it undoes the transactions still active at.
Atomic semantics - Atomic semantics Atomic Semantics is a term which describes the guarantees provided by a data register shared by several processors in a parallel machine or in a network of computers working together Atomic semantics are defined formally in Lamport's "On Interprocess Communication" Distributed Computing 1, 2 (1986), 77-101. (Also appeared as SRC Research Report 8). Atomic semantics are defined for a variable with a single writer but multiple readers. These semantics are very strong: they guarantee that the read and write operations to the variable behave exactly as if they happened instantaneously in some point in time which is within the actual time where the operation took place. see also: Regular semantics and Safe semantics.
Safe semantics - Safe semantics Safe Semantics is a term which describes the guarantees provided by a data register shared by several processors in a parallel machine or in a network of computers working together Safe semantics are defined formally in Lamport's "On Interprocess Communication" Distributed Computing 1, 2 (1986), 77-101. (Also appeared as SRC Research Report 8). Safe semantics are defined for a variable with a single writer but multiple readers. These semantics are weak: they only guarantee that there is a total ordering of the writes and that a read which is not concurrent with any write will return the latest value. If a write is concurrent with the read then any value can be returned (for example, if a variable had value 5 and was being changed.
Semantics - Semantics In general, Semantics (from the Greek semantikos, or "significant meaning," derived from "sema," sign) always refers to some kind of meaning (of something that is written) and is thus usually opposed to syntax, which refers to the formal way in which something is written. Fields and subfields within linguistics. phonetics phonology morphology syntax semantics lexical semantics stylistics pragmatics Cognitive linguistics 1. Semantics is a subfield of linguistics that is traditionally defined as the study of meaning. One area of study is the meaning of compounds, another is the study of relations between different linguistic expressions (homonymy, synonymy, antonymy, polysemy, hypernymy, hyponymy). Semantics includes the study of thematic roles. Semantics deals with sense and reference, truth conditions and discourse analysis. Pragmatics is often considered a part.
Semantics-directed Environment Adaptation Language - Semantics-directed Environment Adaptation Language SEAL is a programming language..
Regular semantics - Regular semantics Regular semantics is a term which describes the guarantees provided by a data register shared by several processors in a parallel machine or in a network of computers working together. Atomic semantics are defined formally in Lamport's "On Interprocess Communication" Distributed Computing 1, 2 (1986), 77-101. (Also appeared as SRC Research Report 8). Regular semantics are defined for a variable with a single writer but multiple readers. These semantics are stronger than safe semantics but weaker than atomic semantics: they guarantee that there is a total order to the write operations which is consistent with real-time and that read operations return either the value of the last completed write or that of one of the writes which are concurrent with the read. see also: Atomic.
Operational semantics - Operational semantics In computer science, operational semantics is one of the approaches to give meaning to computer programs in a mathematically rigorous way (see semantics of programming languages). An operational semantics for a particular programming language describes how any particular valid program in the language is interpreted as sequences of computational steps. These sequences then are the meaning of the program. In the context of functional programs, the final step in a terminating sequence returns the value of the program. (In general there can be many computation sequences and many return values for a single program, because the program could be nondeterministic.) One of the most common ways used to rigorously define an operational semantics is to provide a state transition system for the language of interest..
Lexical semantics - Lexical semantics Fields and subfields within linguistics. phonetics phonology morphology syntax semantics lexical semantics stylistics pragmatics Cognitive linguistics Lexical semantics is a field in Computer science and Linguistics which deals mainly with word meaning. It covers various theories of the structure of words, the differences and similarities in lexical semantic structure between different languages, and the relationship of word meaning to sentence meaning and syntax. External Links http://grouchy.cs.indiana.edu/l/www/classes/c661/words.html.
Very long instruction word - or (in some architectures) even start to compute them speculatively. If the CPU guesses wrong, all of these instructions and their context need to be "flushed" and the correct ones loaded, which is time-consuming. This has led to increasingly complex decoders that attempt to guess right, and the simplicity of the original RISC designs has been eroded. In a VLIW, the compiler uses heuristic or profile information to guess the direction of a branch. This allows it to move and preschedule operations speculatively before the branch is taken, favoring the most likely path it expects through the branch. If the branch goes the unexpected way, the compiler has already generated compensation code to discard speculative results in order to preserve program semantics. The term VLIW, and the VLIW architecture concept, was.
Knowledge representation - notation for representing relationships between objects Examples of artificial languages intended for knowledge representation include: CycL Loom OWL Techniques of knowledge representation Semantic networks may be used to represent knowledge. Each node represents a concept and the arcs are used to define relations between the concepts. From earliest times, the knowledge frame or just frame has been used. A frame consists of slots which contain values; for instance, the frame for house might contain a color slot, number of floors slot, etc. Frames can behave something like object-oriented programming languages, with inheritance of features described by the "is-a" link. However, there has been no small amount of inconsistency in the usage of the "is-a" link: Richard P. Gabriel wrote a paper titled "What IS-A is and isn't", wherein 29 different semantics.
Knaster-Tarski theorem - existence of at least one fixed point of f, and even the existence of a least (or greatest) fixed point. In many practical cases, this is the most important implication of the theorem. For example, in mathematical logic least fixed points of functions on sets of formulas are used to compute the semantics of a logic program. Sometimes a more specialized version of the theorem is used, where L is assumed to be the lattice of all subsets of a certain set ordered by subset inclusion. This reflects the fact that in many applications only such lattices are considered. One then usually is looking for the smallest set that has the property of being a fixed point of the function f. References Alfred Tarski: A lattice-theoretical fixpoint theorem and its applications..
Knowledge - is based on direct observation. It is still not free of uncertainty, as errors of observation or interpretation may occur, and any sense can be deceived by illusions. Inferential knowledge is based on reasoning from facts or from other inferential knowledge such as a theory. Such knowledge may or may not be verifiable by observation or testing. For example, all knowledge of the atom is inferential knowledge. The distinction between factual knowledge and inferential knowledge has been explored by the discipline of general semantics. Roger Bacon, an English alchemist and philosopher of the high middle ages, had this to say about knowledge: "Of the three ways in which men think that they acquire knowledge of things - authority, reasoning, and experience - only the last is effective and able to bring.
Jerry Fodor - Way: The Scope and Limits of Computational Psychology, MIT Press, 2000. In Critical Condition, MIT Press, 1998. Concepts: Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong, (The 1996 John Locke Lectures), Oxford University Press, 1998. The Elm and the Expert, Mentalese and its Semantics, (The 1993 Jean Nicod Lectures), MIT Press, 1994. Holism: A Consumer Update, (ed. with E. Lepore), Grazer Philosophische Studien, Vol 46. Rodopi, Amsterdam, 1993. Holism: A Shopper's Guide, (ed. with E. Lepore), Blackwell, 1992. A Theory of Content and Other Essays, MIT Press, 1990. Psychosemantics: The Problem of Meaning in the Philosophy of Mind, MIT Pres, 1987. The Modularity of Mind: An Essay on Faculty Psychology, MIT Press, 1983. Representations: Essays on the Foundations of Cognitive Science, Harvard Press (UK) and MIT Press (US), 1979. The Language of Thought, Harvard.
John McDowell - most noted work has been in the philosophy of mind and language. In the 1970s he was active in the project of semantics for natural language that had been initiated by Donald Davidson. His work is also heavily influenced by Wilfrid Sellars, P. F. Strawson, and Gareth Evans. In more recent years he has advocated an externalist theory of mind, and contends that a due respect for scientific naturalism should not preclude our treating mentalistic vocabulary as real--as actually referring to and describing the world. He has also written on Wittgenstein, Kant, Ancient Philosophy, and ethics. McDowell's John Locke lectures at Oxford are reprinted in Mind and World. Many of his papers are collected in Mind, Value, and Reality and Meaning, Knowledge, and Reality..
IGS - Exchange Specification Inertial Guidance System Institute of General Semantics Institute of Geological Sciences Institute of Governmental Studies Integrated Graphics System International genealogical search International Games System Information Global Service.
