Not Exactly: in praise of vagueness<BR>

Web site accompanying the book Not Exactly: in Praise of Vagueness, by Kees van Deemter, Oxford University Press, Jan. 2010.

Talks

Columbus, Ohio, Oct. 2006. In this research seminar I show how computers can generate descriptions such as 'the tall man'. (Updated, LOT Summer School, Tilburg 2008.) (50 minutes)
Harbin, Aug. 2008. An overview of vagueness in Artificial Intelligence, for the HIT Graduate Summer School in Harbin, China. (3 hours)
Paris, Jan. 2009. Research seminar at the Institut Jean-Nicod. This talk focusses on the vagueness inherent in measurement, and the vagueness of species terms. (1 hour 15 minutes)
Athens, April 2009. Invited talk at ENLG-2009 on the role of utility in language generation. (1 hour)
Dublin, May 2009. This research seminar discusses the question why language is vague. (1 hour)
Amsterdam, Dec. 2009. This presentation for the 2009 Amsterdam Colloquium explores the connections between vagueness and search. (25 minutes)
Stockholm School of Economics, Riga, Jan. 2010. This research seminar elaborates on the one in Amsterdam by adding a survey of answers to the question why vagueness can be useful. (90 minutes) An updated version of this talk was presented at the workshop Logic, Language and Cognition, Guangzhou 5 Dec. 2010.
Public lectures about the book were presented at KIM in Riga, Latvia (Jan. 2010), at the WORD festival in Aberdeen (May 2010), at the Harbin Institute of Technology in China (Aug. 2010), at Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangzhou, China (SELLC Winter School, Dec 2010), and at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany (EMBL Forum Seminar on Science and Society, Dec. 2010). Here is one example of such a public lecture, as presented in Heidelberg.
As part of Aberdeen's University-wide 1st-year course Mankind in the Universe, this lecture was presented in May 2011. The second half of the lecture focusses on using computers to generate texts from data, and asks whether this can be done objectively. The lecture stresses how we often talk about numerical information in evaluative and ultimately theory laden ways.

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