Papers reviewed and determined not to be word norm studies. Use the flag icon to report errors or suggest re-inclusion.
16504 papers
WordNet-like Lexical Databases (WLDs) group English words into synsets, being utilized in several text mining applications. Synsets were also open to criticism, because while synset members (wordsenses) are, in practice, considered as compeers, yet in theory not all of them represent the synset meaning with a same degree. Considering this criticism, fuzzy synsets (considering synsets as fuzzy sets) have been proposed. In this study, we show why the standard fuzzy synsets do not properly-enough model the membership uncertainty, and propose an upgraded version of them in which membership degrees are represented by intervals (similar to what in Interval Type 2 Fuzzy Sets). We present an algorithm for constructing the interval fuzzy version of WLDs of a language, given a large enough multi-contextual corpus of documents and a precise enough word-sense-disambiguation (WSD) system of that language. Utilizing the algorithm, we produced interval fuzzy synsets of English WordNet (for the frequent-enough synsets). For evaluation, we compared the results with crowdsourced data, asking people to rate the min/max compatibility degree of wordsenses of a synset with its definition. Comparisons, promisingly, showed the algorithm accuracy. The algorithm has also the drawback of being applicable only for synsets with wordsenses having enough frequency in all the corpus categories. This drawback is going to be covered in our future work.
There is a large number of Persian expressions in Arabic language which subject to its laws and lexicons and this is a special characteristic of Arabic. Any word subject to the morpho-syntactic patterns of the language become Arabic. But when you go back to its roots, it cannot be denied that more than half of the Persian words entered Arabic language in several forms such as transliteration or as foreign words. It can be noticed that the dialed of people of Dhi Qar were affected by Persian words; this is due to several reasons, the most important is the proximity and communication between the people of Dhi Qar and the Iranians, war, trade and intermarriage between the two countries. Persian language can be considered as one of the main tributaries to Arabic and Islamic civilization for its scientific and literary product by scholars, intellectuals and writers. Factors affecting the evolution of Persian language to reach its current status down are many and overlapping; we cannot pass on one unless we dwell and probe its depths. This overlap and linguistic cross-fertilization between the Arab and Persian is as old as history. This mutual influence between them continues to this day and will not be interrupted or disappear as long as this juxtaposition exists. The Arab- Persian juxtaposition and the absence of borders led to the mutual influence between them in all areas of life. Use controls and brings new expressions into existence and also neglects other words to die out. In this way languages are renewed and live; this is a universal linguistic norm. The researcher has collected a number of Persian expressions used by the people of Dhi Qar. Their meanings and use are clarified in simple terms to make them accessible to readers, researchers, and students who have interest in the subject.
The relevance of the notion of normativeness (i.e. it pertains to a norm regarded as the standard of correctness in speech) for many people and linguists rests on the fact that only one or two varieties of the English language act as a model or norm, typically Standard English. I believe that, while that reference to the norm is somewhat linguistically and pedagogically necessary, particularly as far as language acquisition and second language learning are concerned, it is arguably a minority use and greater emphasis ought to be laid on describing non-standard varieties of the language at the morphosyntactic level. A large number of dialectologists and sociolinguists have been carrying out research on varieties of English and dialects other than Standard British English or General American, but I seek to bolster interest in analyzing the grammar of non-standard English in utterer-centered terms. An important topic in the study of non-standard varieties of English is the distance there may be between the core system of the English language and the actual linguistic realization of it. There is evidence of two competing forces, one centripetal and one centrifugal with a risk of fragmenting. One of the issues relating to the notion of linguistic norm is, therefore, the status of observed irregularities in language behavior, and whether one can reasonably deem these “errors” or “mistakes”, since native speakers perform them and by essence people who speak their mother tongue do not make mistakes. These irregularities may reflect inadequate competence as regards the norm, but they generally do not question the grammaticality of the performance, which is, I argue, intuitive. Thus, the notion of grammaticality not only depends on linguistic knowledge, but also resembles a sometimes unconscious codification of the language by users. Their grammar corresponds to internalized patterns which may relate to a fluctuating norm.
As in many sciences, cross-linguistic data is often complex and multi-dimensional. The PHOIBLE database of phonological inventories (Moran et al. 2014) is one example, containing 2160 distinct segments across 2155 phoneme inventories. Each segment type is defined by a unique vector of (mostly binary) distinctive phonetic and phonological features. This multivariate dataset can be modeled as a set of coordinates, where each variable (e.g. segment, its distinctive features, its presence in a language, the language's genealogy and location) is an axis in high-dimensional space. Often, such high dimensionality is reduced during analysis. For example, methods which match segments between phonological inventories, such as phonetic string alignment algorithms used for the automated detection of cognates or phonetic similarity measures, typically collapse the vast variability of segment types into as few as ten sound classes. What is unclear is how much information is lost and whether this loss is uniform across languages, subgroups and linguistic areas. This question is important given the increase in publications using large cross-linguistic databases that conflate phonological variability, such as the Automated Similarity Judgment Program (ASJP; Wichmann et al. 2016), and quantitative approaches using these datasets to approximate phonological diversity, linguistic distance measures, language classification, etc. Presented here is a method for empirically tracking information loss resulting from dimensionality reduction procedures. We evaluate several common procedures and demonstrate that information loss varies significantly across the world's languages and between different methods, and further, information loss is correlated with broad-scale linguistic genealogy and geography. Methodology To measure information loss in a given language for a given dimensionality reduction procedure, we use a simple 'conflation index', c, which compares the number of distinct phonemic categories in the language after reduction, nreduced, with the full number of distinct categories prior to reduction ninitial. Given that a maximally conflated inventory would contain 1 category, and thus be reduced by (ninitial - 1) phonemes, we define c as (ninitial - nreduced)/(ninitial - 1). We measure c for each language in PHOIBLE for each reduction procedure, and examine its distribution among geographic and genealogical groups. The reduction procedures examined are mappings onto (1) the ASJP orthography (Wichmann et al. 2016); (2) the SCA inventory (List 2012); and (3) Dolgopolsky's macro-phoneme set (Dolgopolsky 1964). Resulting conflation levels are compared across Glottolog continent-level Areas and Families (Hammarström et al. 2016). Results An example of c values, for the ASJP procedure, is in Fig. 1. Distributions of c are significantly non- normal (Shapiro-Wilk's W, alpha=0.05) within the majority of Glottolog areas and families for all reduction procedures. Accordingly, comparisons are made by non-parametric methods. Kruskal-Wallis H tests a null hypothesis that samples are from the same underlying distribution. We first examined whether the distribution of c varied between continent-sized areas. Results allow us to reject to hypothesis that samples from distinct continental areas are all drawn from the same population. Post-hoc pair-wise comparisons between each of the 10 area pairs reveal a significant difference (at an adjusted alpha rate corresponding to single-comparison rate of 0.05) between Pacific and Africa, the Americas and Asia; and Africa and the Americas (ASJP method), between all pairs bar Europe–Africa and Europe-Asia (SCA), and between all bar Europe and Africa (Dolgopolsky). To examine genealogical variation in the conflation index c, we compared Glottolog families within areas, asking if samples were drawn from a single area-specific population. Hypothesis testing requires families of reasonable size (we use n>=10). For all three inventory reduction procedures, all areas do contain families with significantly different distributions of c, with the exception of Europe in the ASJP condition. Post-hoc pair-wise testing reveals considerable variation in the proportion of pairs which differ significantly, across areas and across procedures. In Africa, only few family pairs are significantly different (1%-20% across the three reduction procedures, n=15) and similarly in the Americas (4%-22%, n=171). In Asia pair-wise, significant differences between families are more common (24%-33%, n=45), as they were in Europe for the non-ASJP procedures (30%, n=10). In the Pacific, too few families are represented sufficient richly to comment.Discussion All three conflation methods affect continental Areas unequally to a statistically significant degree. Moreover, the variation within Areas differs: Asia is most diversely affected, Africa and the Americas are less so yet still show statistically significant diversity. Only within Europe is there no statistically significant difference among families, and only for one reduction procedure, ASJP. Consequently, research designs employing phonologically conflated data and tested initially with European languages may not generalise as expected to other areas of the world. Conflation methods affect continental Areas in differing patterns and to varying extents. Dolgopolsky's method, which effects the most radical conflation, has the starkest disparity across Areas, relative to ASJP and SCA methods. Comparing Areas according to the disparities between families when different methods are employed: Europe is the most uniform and Asia is the least, however the methods produce both different magnitudes and rankings of disparities throughout. Conclusions High dimensionality is a hallmark of cross-linguistic data. As databases grow and research focus turns to macro-scale phenomena, attention should be paid to the kind and quantity of information lost during data processing and analysis. In this study, we have evaluated how information is lost through three processes which conflate phonological information, including the method employed by ASJP and subsequently used in numerous publications for topics including comparing segments between languages, for proposing regular sound correspondence, for approximating phonological distance and diversity, and for proposing genealogical classifications. However, as we show here, reducing phonological data before undertaking these analyses has broad but quantifiable ramifications for the results reported in these studies. Research designs should be robustly evaluated, using tools such as the conflation index presented here, c, to ensure broader generalizability and to highlight the shortcomings of research using conflated phonological information.
A number of clinically important general anesthetics positively modulate function of γ-aminobutyric acid type A (GABAA) receptors through allosteric interactions with their transmembrane domains. Most GABAA receptors consist of two α, two β, and one γ subunit arranged βαβαγ counterclockwise, creating four distinct types of subunit interfaces: α+-β–, α+-γ–, β+-γ–, and two β+-α–. Several intravenous anesthetics bind within intersubunit cavities as identified by anesthetic photolabeling with photoreactive anesthetics. Complementary structure-function studies involving site-directed mutagenesis of amino acid residues lining the five predicted intersubunit binding pockets in a typical GABAA receptor show that four intravenous anesthetics have distinct but overlapping patterns of interaction with the receptor. These findings validate previous anesthetic photolabeling findings and further define the properties of the distinct sites that mediate the potentiating effects of various intravenous anesthetics with GABAA receptors. See the accompanying Editorial View on page 1088.Two studies reported an association between the cumulative duration of a “triple low” of low mean arterial pressure (MAP), low bispectral index (BIS), and low end-tidal minimum alveolar concentration and mortality. The hypothesis that an automated intraoperative decision support alert for double low conditions, defined as MAP less than 75 mmHg and BIS less than 45, will reduce 90-day all-cause mortality was tested in 19,092 patients having noncardiac surgery who were randomized to receive either alerts for double low events or no alerts. Double low alerts prompted clinical intervention that decreased double low duration slightly, but did not decrease 90-day mortality. Advanced age, American Society of Anesthesiologists Physical Status of 3 or higher, and clinical comorbidities were all strong predictors of mortality. After controlling for patient and procedural risk factors, prolonged exposure to double low conditions was associated with increased 90-day mortality.The PeriOperative ISchemia Evaluation-2 (POISE-2) trial determined the effects of perioperative aspirin and clonidine on a broad range of cardiovascular outcomes in patients having noncardiac surgery. The present article reports the effects of aspirin on the occurrence of venous thromboembolism (VTE) in 10,010 POISE-2 patients randomly assigned to receive 200 mg aspirin or placebo 2 to 4 h before surgery followed by 100 mg aspirin daily or placebo for up to 30 days after surgery. VTE occurred in 53 patients (1.1%) allocated to aspirin and in 60 patients (1.2%) allocated to placebo (hazard ratio [HR] for the aspirin group = 0.89; 95% CI, 0.61–1.28). Major or life-threatening bleeding occurred in 312 patients (6.3%) allocated to aspirin and in 256 patients (5.1%) allocated to placebo (HR = 1.22; 95% CI, 1.04–1.44).The highly polymorphic cytochrome P4502B6 (CYP2B6) is the major enzyme catalyzing hepatic ketamine N-demethylation and overall ketamine metabolism at clinically relevant concentrations. The hypothesis that CYP2B6 variants (CYP2B6*6 heterozygotes or homozygotes) in vivo will have decreased ketamine metabolism and clearance was tested in 30 volunteers, 10 with each of the genotypes CYP2B6*1/*1 (wild-type), CYP2B6*1/*6, and CYP2B6*6/*6, who were administered a nonsedating oral dose of ketamine. There were no significant differences among subjects with the various genotypes in the N-demethylation of ketamine, assessed as either norketamine/ketamine area under the plasma concentration versus time curve ratio or norketamine formation clearance. There were also no differences in plasma concentrations of either enantiomer of ketamine, the primary metabolite norketamine, or the secondary metabolite dehydronorketamine. In vitro genetic differences may not have translated to in vivo differences because ketamine is a high hepatic extraction ratio drug. See the accompanying Editorial View on page 1085.The benzylisoquinolinium nondepolarizing neuromuscular blocking drug CW002 had an ED95 of 0.01 to 0.04 mg/kg in a variety of animal models and an intermediate duration of action. CW002 had minimal cardiopulmonary side effects and caused no histamine release in animal models until doses much larger than the ED95 were administered. A phase 1, first-in-man study was conducted to assess CW002 potency and neuromuscular blockade onset and recovery, along with dose-related effects on plasma histamine concentration, blood pressure, heart rate, and ventilation dynamics. The ED95 of CW002 in man was approximately 0.077 mg/kg. The clinical onset time of CW002 at a dose that was 1.8 times the ED95 was approximately 90 s and its mean clinical duration was 34 min. The ED95 of CW002 in man produced minimal cardiopulmonary side effects and no histamine release.Patient education material produced by national anesthesiology associations is meant to help the public understand the contributions of anesthesiologists to perioperative care and may be used to facilitate patient informed consent. Material written for patients should use language between the sixth and eighth grade level. The linguistics of topically organized content from online patient educational materials generated by 24 anesthesiology associations in six English-speaking countries were evaluated using software that provides linguistic norms grouped into grade levels between kindergarten and twelfth grade. Two thirds of the anesthesiology associations examined provided educational materials, no passages of which had all linguistic measures at or below the eighth grade level. The language used was especially inappropriate for topics that are critical to promoting the discipline of anesthesiology and facilitating patient informed consent.Hippocampal dentate granule cells, which play important roles in cognition and behavior, are especially vulnerable to anesthesia-induced neurotoxicity in postnatal day 21 (P21, a brain maturational stage comparable to human infants) mice. Because granule cells are produced throughout life, the dentate could regenerate lost cells. A genetic fate-mapping approach was used to determine whether developmental anesthesia exposure leads to persistent deficits in granule cell numbers. Granule cell progenitors were genetically fate-mapped in P7 mice by inducing persistent green fluorescent protein (GFP) expression and animals were exposed to 6 h of 1.5% isoflurane on P21. Although isoflurane treatment produced a fivefold increase in apoptosis among GFP-labeled daughter cells immediately after anesthesia, GFP-labeled cell density in animals exposed to isoflurane was not different from that in control animals 60 days later, when animals were young adults. See the accompanying Editorial View on page 1090.Delirium is a common and serious clinical manifestation of acute brain organ dysfunction associated with important adverse clinical outcomes. Recognition of this has led to routine screening for delirium and an increased interest in identifying and implementing effective prevention strategies. This Clinical Concepts and Commentary explores both predisposing and precipitating risk factors for intensive care unit (ICU) delirium, tools for its diagnosis such as the Confusion Assessment Method for the ICU and the Intensive Care Delirium Screening Checklist, preventative strategies including multidisciplinary ICU care bundles, and its potential pharmacologic treatments. This information can be used throughout the patient’s hospitalization, including in the perioperative environment, and can be practiced by anesthesiologists as well as intensivists to improve patient care.
INTRODUCTION: Attractive people elicit more positive first impressions.1 Conversely, facial deformity diminishes quality of life even after surgical reconstruction of a cleft deformity.2,3 Symmetry has been shown to be one significant factor influencing aesthetic judgments of the face.4,5 PURPOSE: To investigate the impact of cleft laterality and attractiveness on the early visual processing of faces with cleft lip. Primary aim: to study the visual markers leading to differential perception of patients with cleft lip. Secondary aim: to evaluate the influence of observer personal history of facial deformity on visual processing of the cleft-affected face. By delineating the focus of visual impression formation, surgeons and their patients may pinpoint the most salient facial features so as to better direct prioritization of surgical reconstruction. MATERIALS AND METHODS: 59 experimental and 59 control facial images were obtained from the senior author’s practice. Experimental images included 15 individuals with repaired cleft lip (6R, 5B, 4L) and 45 with a variety of other facial diagnoses. 240 subjects rated the images for attractiveness. Twenty standardized lookzone regions were mapped onto each facial image. A separate group of 170 subjects observed the images while an infrared eye-tracking camera continuously recorded their eye movements. Personal history of observer facial deformity was solicited. Factorial ANOVA analysis was performed to determine significance of gaze patterns and attractiveness between groups. Outcomes Measured: Image attractiveness was rated on a 1–7 Likert scale. Total number of eye fixations within different lookzone regions was recorded. RESULTS: The following observations were statistically significant at p<0.01 level: (i) Subjects preferentially fixated on the periorbital regions of all faces, but paid greater attention to the perioral region of cleft-affected versus control faces. (ii) Above phenomenon tracked closely to laterality of cleft. (iii) Subjects fixated more on unilateral than on bilateral cleft lip. (iv) More attractive the overall cleft image rating, the less time the perioral region was fixated upon. (v) Observers with personal history of facial deformity fixated longer on the perioral region of cleft faces. CONCLUSION: Observers are drawn to the abnormal region of cleft faces. Unilateral clefts - and cleft faces that are considered less attractive overall - induce relatively greater fixation within the perioral region. Personal history of facial deformity may heighten detection of, and/or diversion towards, the cleft deformity. DISCLOSURE/FINANCIAL SUPPORT:No financial support. None of the authors have any financial interest in any of the products, devices, or drugs mentioned in this manuscript. REFERENCES: 1. Kaplan, RM Is Beauty Talent? Sex Interaction in the Attractiveness Halo Effect 4(2):195–204, Apr 1978 2. Berger Z, Dalton L. Coping with a cleft: Psychosocial adjustment of adolescents with a cleft lip and palate and their parents. Cleft Palate Craniofacial J. 48:435–443 Dec 2009 3. Klassen AF, Stotland MA, Skarsgard ED, Pusic AL. Clinical research in pediatric plastic surgery and systematic review of quality-of-life questionnaires. Clin Plast Surg. (35):251–267 Apr 2008 4. Jones BC, Little AC, Tiddeman BP, Burt DM, Perrett, DI Facial symmetry and judgements of apparent health. Support for a “‘ good genes ‘” explanation of the attractiveness – symmetry relationship, Evol Hum Behav 22(6):417–429 Nov 2001 5. Fink B, Neave N, Manning JT, Grammer K Facial symmetry and judgements of attractiveness, health and personality. Pers Individ Differ 41(3), 491–499 Aug 2006
Lexical semantics continues to play an important role in driving research directions in NLP, with the recognition and understanding of context becoming increasingly important in delivering successful outcomes in NLP tasks. Besides traditional processing areas such as word sense and named entity disambiguation, the creation and maintenance of dictionaries, annotated corpora and resources have become cornerstones of lexical semantics research and produced a wealth of contextual information that NLP processes can exploit. New efforts both to link and construct from scratch such information - as Linked Open Data or by way of formal tools coming from logic, ontologies and automated reasoning - have increased the interoperability and accessibility of resources for lexical and computational semantics, even in those languages for which they have previously been limited. LexSem+Logics 2016 combines the 1st Workshop on Lexical Semantics for Lesser-Resources Languages and the 3rd Workshop on Logics and Ontologies. The accepted papers in our program covered topics across these two areas, including: the encoding of plurals in Wordnets, the creation of a thesaurus from multiple sources based on semantic similarity metrics, and the use of cross-lingual treebanks and annotations for universal part-of-speech tagging. We also welcomed talks from two distinguished speakers: on Portuguese lexical knowledge bases (different approaches, results and their application in NLP tasks) and on new strategies for open information extraction (the capture of verb-based propositions from massive text corpora).
An aim of the present study is to examine the impact of inter-generational cooperation on the quality of life of elderly Alzheimer’s sufferers. The study is a continuing, two-year intervention report. The subject consist of an intervention and a control groups of six and five sufferers, respectively, who were diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Both groups attend day care services. The intervention group participates in the inter-generational program with children, while the control group does not. In the results, the score of Quality of Life – Alzheimer’s disease (QOL-AD ) of the subjects has been significantly higher in the intervention group comparing with that of the control group. been significantly higher in the intervention group comparing with that of the control group. Also the Philadelphia Geriatric Center Affect Rating Scale(PGC-ARS), have been significantly higher in the intervention group those in the control group., The magnitude of the change was not so remarkable as to influence QOL-AD at home. The present intergenerational cooperation may improve the quality of life of moderate to severe Alzheimer’s sufferers.
The present article introduces a list of glosses to a collection of Lithuanian protestant spiritual hymns, compelled by Gottfried Ostermeyer, one of the prominent intellectuals and promoter of the Lithuanian culture and language of the 18th century in Lithuania Minor. The glossary was intended to facilitate the understanding of certain older or less known expressions, as Ostermeyer put it ‘obsoleta und minus cognita’, and due to political disputes among the intellectual community in East Prussian Lithuania Minor at the time of their publication fell into oblivion. The paper discuses a more or less random selection of twenty entries from the glossary, focusing on their dialectal features, semantic and morphological divergence from existing derivatives of the same root, and pays special attention to the derivational history and cross-IE cognates. Judging by the material studied in the paper the Lithuanian spoken idiom of the 17th-18th c. appears to be very vivid in onomasiology, creative in the usage of morphological means and still in possession of certain roots already gone in the dictionaries of the late 19th century and scarcely perceivable in the modern paramount linguistic database of LKŽ.
Objective: In humans and other animals, open, expansive postures (compared to contracted postures) are evolutionary developed expressions of power and have been shown to cause neuroendocrine and behavioral changes (Carney, Cuddy, & Yap, 2010). In the present study we aimed to investigate whether power postures have a bearing on the participant’s facial appearance and whether others are able to distinguish faces after “high power posing” from faces after “low power posing”. Methods: 16 models were photographed 4-5 minutes after having adopted high and low power postures. Two different high power and two different low power postures were held for 2 minutes each. Power-posing sessions were performed on two consecutive days. High and low power photographs of each model were paired and an independent sample of 100 participants were asked to pick the more dominant and the more likeable face of each pair. Results: Photographs that were taken after adopting high power postures were chosen significantly more often as being more dominant looking. There was no preference when asked to choose the more likeable photograph (chance level). A further independent sample rated each photograph for head tilt, making it unlikely that dominance ratings were caused merely by the posture of the head. Consistently, facial width-to-height ratio did not differ between faces after high and low power posing. Conclusions: Postures associated with high power affect facial appearance, leading to a more dominant looking face. This finding may have implications for everyday life, for instance when a dominant appearance is needed.
In the article the basic differences of the Belgian variant of French from normative French in France at the level of vocabulary are examined. The main word-formation models adopted from different languages, and also some archaisms that no longer exist in French of France, are presented. Examples of word-formation models by means of affixation, compound words, and also semantic derivation are given. Archaisms that mainly correspond to the field of law, and also to some extent to the common language are considered. In Belgian French an important number of words, formed with help of affixes, used in French of France, can be found. The difference is that words of modern coinage that we get in this way, don’t exist in French of France. It is shown, that in everyday language of Brussels some diminutival elements of Flemish origin are used. There exist a lot of words, that have different meanings in Belgian French and in French of France, i.e. semantic Belgicisms. It is proved that borrowings in Belgian French are conditioned by geographical situation and administrative arrangement of Belgium, and also by the fact that Belgium was under the governance of Spain and Austria for a long time. Different examples of Flemish and English borrowings are given, as well as the reasons for their appearance. The multitude of dialectal and sociological variants, that specificate Belgian French, establish a framework for deeper studies of French, as it has multifaceted character. It is concluded that in French language studies the existence of different norms of French should be considered, that are conditioned by the existence of different variants of French in different French-speaking countries. Key words: linguistic norm, vocabulary, word formation, borrowings, archaisms, didactics.
Term sense disambiguation is very essential for different approaches of NLP, including Internet search engines, information retrieval, Data mining, classification etc. However, the old methods using case frames and semantic primitives are not qualify for solving term ambiguities which needs a lot of information with sentences. This new approach introduces a building structure system of natural language knowledge. In this paper all surface case patterns is classified in advance with the consideration of the meaning of noun. Moreover, this paper introduces an efficient data structure using a trie which define the linkage among leaves and multi-attribute relations. By using this linkage multi-attribute relations, we can get a high frequent access among verbs and noun with an automatic generation of hierarchical relationships. In our experiment a large tagged corpus (Pan Treebank) is used to extract data. In our approach around 11,000 verbs and nouns is used for verifying the new method and made a hierarchy group of its noun. Moreover, the achievement of term disambiguating using our trie structure method and linking trie among leaves is 6% higher than old method.
Several studies exist in the literature that address the problem of emotion classification of visual stimuli but less effort has been devoted to emotion classification of audio stimuli. The most of these studies start from the analysis of physiological signals such as EEG data [1]. The aim of this work is to evaluate if it is possible to classify audio signals according to elicited emotions using only objective features. In our analysis we adopt the IADS (International Affective Digitized Sound) database [2], composed of 167 auditory stimuli. The database provides pleasure, arousal and dominance ratings for each audio stimulus, recorded from 100 subjects during psycho physical test. The database is formed by different type of audio: from environmental sounds to music, as well as from single sound to complex ones. We start considering the affective dimension of valence within the three categorical classes of low, medium and high pleasure. To investigate this classification task we consider 35 features both in time and frequency domain. With these features, we test three types of classifiers: Bayesian, K Nearest Neighbor and Classification and Regression Tree [3]. We apply a feature selection strategy in order to find the more significant features. Using these features and the Bayesian classifier we have reached an average accuracy of 45%. A similar result is achieved using physiological signals [1]. Starting from our results we believe that dividing each audio files in frames and applying a windowing strategy to evaluate objective features, the final classification performance could significantly increase.
The author focuses on the methods of graphic (visual) coding of narrative polyphony in English postmodern fiction text. Resting on integrative interdisciplinary approach applied to the study of the issue under analysis, the author substantiates that the graphic surface of postmodern fiction text bears a particular layout, perspective and store of graphic (visual) signs originating from heterogeneous semiotic modes, both verbal and nonverbal. In this paper, the author defines and classifies visual signs as units of graphic coding of narrative polyphony in English postmodern multimodal fiction text. Graphic signs do not only change the graphic surface of the text, but also shape its new narrative structure, both of which construct polysemantic content of the text. Sinking into multimodal research, the author provides a study of the nature of graphic innovations as text units functioning on various text levels, both as attractors and distractors of its coded content that mirror linguistic norm democratization. By illustrating the applied methods in a text fragment from the English multimodal polyphonic fiction narrative, the author concludes that graphic coding units manifest postmodern fiction text as a synergetic whole in that the latter is a self-organized non-linear dissipative system that generates multiple ways of deconstructive text interpretation manipulating the reader. The author strongly believes that the findings may generate consequent research in the field of multimodal narratology.
Research questions: This study examined gender difference in the effect of post-learning positive emotion on consolidation of memory for definitions of English vocabulary. Methodology: A 2 (emotion group: neutral and positive) × 2 (gender: male and female) × 2 (emotion duration: 3 and 9 min) design was used. Participants memorized Chinese definitions of English words, took an immediate test, watched a neutral (lasting for 3 or 9 min) or positive (lasting for 3 or 9 min) video, and took a delayed memory test. Data and Analysis: Data of male ( n = 59) and female ( n = 67) participants were analyzed. For evaluation of emotion induction, a 3 (time: before watching, during watching, and after watching) × 2 (emotion group: neutral and positive) × 2 (gender: male and female) × 2 (emotion duration: 3 and 9 min) was respectively conducted on pleasure and arousal ratings. For memory performance, a similar analysis of variance without time as a factor was conducted. Findings: With a 3-min duration, positive emotion had little effect on memory consolidation. However, with a 9-min duration, positive emotion tended to impair memory consolidation for males but not for females. Originality: Extending the literature showing females’ superiority in memory for words and pictures, this study shows that female students also have memory advantage in English vocabulary. Furthermore, this is the first study suggesting that memory consolidation of male students is more likely to be disrupted by a relatively long duration of positive emotion after learning. Significance/implications: The current finding on gender difference may shed new light on employing emotion as a strategy of memory intervention. There seems to be a need to keep males rather than females from post-learning positive emotion, especially when emotion duration is relatively long.
To solve the defect which is recognizing but not rating the stress,or rating but not considering the influence of the previous stress state to the current state of the existing affective stress evaluation method,this paper proposes an approach of affective stress rating model on electrocardiogram(ECG).An affective stress rating algorithm based on hidden Markov model(HMM)was established with the theory of affective computing.The individual’s affective stress was rated using this affective rating model combining the investigation questionnaire.Features like complexity and approximate entropy of ECG were used in the model,and a matching process suggested that it improved the accuracy of affective stress rating.The result of the experiment illustrated that the model considering the environmental factors and the influence of previous stress state to the current state was an effective method in affective stress rating,and the accuracy of rating was improved by this affective stress rating method.
In werkwoordsgroepen met een vervangende infinitief (IPP) wordt in het Nederlands de keuze van het hulpwerkwoord van de voltooide tijd doorgaans bepaald door de IPP, zoals in heeft kunnen komen, maar de keuze kan ook door het hoofdwerkwoord bepaald worden, zoals in is kunnen komen. Gebruik makend van een aantal treebanks en corpora (CGN, Lassy, SoNaR) hebben we onderzocht welke IPP’s deze alternantie vertonen. Dat blijken er naast kunnen nog minstens 13 andere te zijn. Voor de twee meest frequente (moeten en kunnen) hebben we vervolgens nagegaan wat de verhouding is van de voorkomens met hebben en zijn in die gevallen waarin de alternantie mogelijk is. Daarbij is gebleken dat in gemiddeld 80% van de gevallen de keuze van het hulpwerkwoord door de IPP wordt bepaald. Een belangrijke factor bij de keuze is de aard van het hoofdwerkwoord.
This study investigates whether and when differences in the credit rating agencies' methodologies result in differences in rating properties. In particular, this study focuses on differences in information processing constraints between a rating agency that utilizes qualitative analysis and direct access to borrowers' management in its rating process (Standard & Poor's) compared to one that does not (Egan Jones Ratings Company) and how these differences affect rating quality. We find that, as information uncertainty about borrowers increases, Egan Jones's rating accuracy, informativeness and timeliness decrease relative to Standard & Poor's. Our findings suggest that Egan Jones's more restricted rating methodology can lead to limitations in information processing and, thus, reductions in Egan Jones's rating quality advantage for borrowers with greater information uncertainty.
Universal Dependencies is the latest standard annotation scheme available, aiming at cross-linguistically consistent treebank annotation. It has already been adapted to a large number of languages including Persian. The trend, however, has been to take into account the original principles of dependency grammar rather than a description of the specific language in dependency terms. This paper reports an attempt to adapt Universal Dependencies to form a scheme for annotation of Persian dependency structure based on a comprehensive description of Persian syntax according to a theory introduced as the Autonomous Phrases Theory. The main idea there is that the significance of phrases should be appreciated in dependency analyses due to their cognitive reality, and the notion of valency is also extended beyond verbs. On that basis, every dependent of whatever head type is classified as either a complement or an adjunct depending on whether or not it plays a role in the valency structure of the head. A tagset was proposed consisting of fifty-three dependency relations, including fifteen original labels and the rest borrowed from the universal dependencies.
The goal of language modeling techniques is to capture the statistical and structural properties of natural languages from training corpora. This task typically involves the learning of short range dependencies, which generally model the syntactic properties of a language and/or long range dependencies, which are semantic in nature. We propose in this paper a new multi-span architecture, which separately models the short and long context information while it dynamically merges them to perform the language modeling task. This is done through a novel recurrent Long-Short Range Context (LSRC) network, which explicitly models the local (short) and global (long) context using two separate hidden states that evolve in time. This new architecture is an adaptation of the Long-Short Term Memory network (LSTM) to take into account the linguistic properties. Extensive experiments conducted on the Penn Treebank (PTB) and the Large Text Compression Benchmark (LTCB) corpus showed a significant reduction of the perplexity when compared to state-of-the-art language modeling techniques.
Detecting automatically the cause relations of a text may be useful in question answering tasks and event information extraction. The aim of this paper is to study how to detect coherence relations of the cause subgroup (CAUSE, RESULT and PURPOSE). TO achieve this aim we have used the Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) and some automatic linguistic information from different tools developed by IXA Group. We have used a corpus of 60 scientific abstracts, the Basque RST Treebank (Iruskieta et al., 2013), of different domains: science, medicine and terminology. A linguist has annotated all the signals of that corpus and described the most important problems in such task. To report the reliability of this annotator, two linguists have annotated the signals of the cause subgroup and all the annotations were compared and evaluated. After that, a superannotator has harmonized all the signals of those cause relations. Finally, we show the most important signals for such relations.
Semantic similarities are a cross-field research in Natural Language Processing and Ontologies with some possible fallout in Artificial Intelligence. Formerly, similarities were computed following a syntactical treatment to support case-based reasoning. Textual similarities are now guided by semantic machineries, offering various ways to compute relatedness measures. In this paper, we present both a logical and a visual framework aiming to reason with them. For that reason, we introduced FLH±, a fragment of description logic underpinning the well-known lexical database Wordnet. We illustrated this framework with the path length relatedness, one of the historical similarity measures occurring in a taxonomy. The core of our framework orchestrates the computation of similarity scores supported by REVERB, STANFORD CORENLP and WORDNET:SIMILARITY APIs and interfaces global similarities in graphical way by positioning them on segments. We also depicted some experimental results to confront our computational framework with some empirical data.
Feedforward Neural Network (FNN)-based language models estimate the probability of the next word based on the history of the last N words, whereas Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) perform the same task based only on the last word and some context information that cycles in the network. This paper presents a novel approach, which bridges the gap between these two categories of networks. In particular, we propose an architecture which takes advantage of the explicit, sequential enumeration of the word history in FNN structure while enhancing each word representation at the projection layer through recurrent context information that evolves in the network. The context integration is performed using an additional word-dependent weight matrix that is also learned during the training. Extensive experiments conducted on the Penn Treebank (PTB) and the Large Text Compression Benchmark (LTCB) corpus showed a significant reduction of the perplexity when compared to state-of-the-art feedforward as well as recurrent neural network architectures.
情绪调节指的是个体对情绪的发生、体验与表达进行调控的能力和过程。良好的情绪调节能力有利于个体保持愉快的心境、改善不利的心境。现有的情绪调节研究大多都局限于负性情绪调节，而正性情绪调节的研究一直很少，当前研究综合行为和电生理方法，对被试在进行正性情绪认知重评调节时的唤醒度和颧肌肌电(zygomatic electromyography，简称zEMG)进行分析。结果发现两个实验中当进行正性情绪上调调节时，唤醒度和肌电指标相比维持调节时都有显著的增强，而下调与维持时肌电差异不显著。两个实验结果一致的证明正性情绪上调效应显著，而下调效应不显著。这表明相对于抑制正性情绪，人们可能更习惯和倾向于增强自身的正性情绪。 Emotion regulation refers to the ability and the process that individual adjusts and controls the occurrence, experience and expression of emotion. Good emotion regulation ability is beneficial for individuals to keep pleasant mood and improve the bad one. Although there are many studies investigating emotion regulation, they are mostly about negative emotion regulation, and few are known about the study of positive emotion regulation. In the current study, we use behavioral and electrophysiology measure of arousal rating and zygomatic electromyography (zEMG) to index the variation of positive emotion regulation. We collect arousal rating in each trial after participants regulate their emotion in Experiment 1 and the activity of zEMG in Experiment 2 in which the par-ticipants regulate their emotions induced by International Affective Picture System pictures. The results indicate that up-regulated effect of positive emotion regulation is significant, but down- regulated effect is not. This suggests that people may be desirable and habitual to increase their positive emotion rather than inhibit it.
We present a study on two key characteristics of human syntactic annotations: anchoring and agreement. Anchoring is a well known cognitive bias in human decision making, where judgments are drawn towards pre-existing values. We study the influence of anchoring on a standard approach to creation of syntactic resources where syntactic annotations are obtained via human editing of tagger and parser output. Our experiments demonstrate a clear anchoring effect and reveal unwanted consequences, including overestimation of parsing performance and lower quality of annotations in comparison with human-based annotations. Using sentences from the Penn Treebank WSJ, we also report systematically obtained inter-annotator agreement estimates for English dependency parsing. Our agreement results control for parser bias, and are consequential in that they are on par with state of the art parsing performance for English newswire. We discuss the impact of our findings on strategies for future annotation efforts and parser evaluations.
Second, in the face of budgetary stringency there may be reluctance to streamline operations by increasing section sizes for lower-level classes. This may be so because faculty members normally teaching these courses perceive of a negative impact of such measures on their ratings. Third, departments may swamp administrative officers with requests to schedule classes during prime time in the belief that odd hours affect ratings negatively. Hence undesirable utilization characteristics may develop. Fourth, a systematic bias may result from the type of material taught or from the nature of the course. Finally, there is the possibility of an adverse effect on one's rating if the course is required.
Integration of models requires linking of components, which may be developed by different teams, using different tools, methodologies, and assumptions. Participating models may operate at different temporal and spatial scales. We describe and discuss the design and prototype of the Distributed Model Integration Framework (DMIF) that links models, which can be deployed on different hardware and software platforms. Distributed computing and service-oriented software development approaches are utilized to address the different aspects of interoperability. Web services are used to enable technical interoperability between models. To illustrate its operation, we developed reusable web service wrappers for models developed in NetLogo and GAMS based modeling languages. We also demonstrated that some of semantic mediation tasks can be handled by using openly available ontologies, and that this technique helps to avoid significant amount of reinvention by different framework developers. We investigated automated semantic mapping of text-based input-output data and attribute names of components using direct semantic matching algorithms and using an openly available lexical database. We found that for short text-based input-output data and attribute names of components direct semantic matching algorithms work much better than applying a lexical database. This holds true for both standardized and non-standardized short text and this is mainly because short text does not include contextual information of data. Furthermore, direct semantic matching algorithms can be applied to search for components that can possibly provide data for a given component (1) if a model repository uses standard names for attributes of components and (2) if metadata of components are made available through an API. As a proof of concept we implemented our design to integrate climate-energy-economy models. Our design can be applied by different modeling groups to link a wide range of models, and it can improve the reusability of models by making them available on the web.
A morphological tagger is a computer program that provides complete morphological descriptions of sentences. Morphological taggers find applications in many NLP fields. For example, they can be used as a pre-processing step for syntactic parsers, in information retrieval and machine translation. The task of morphological tagging is closely related to POS tagging but morphological taggers provide more fine-grained morphological information than POS taggers. Therefore, they are often applied to morphologically complex languages, which extensively utilize inflection, derivation and compounding for encoding structural and semantic information. This thesis presents work on data-driven morphological tagging for Finnish and other morphologically complex languages. \n\nThere exists a very limited amount of previous work on data-driven morphological tagging for Finnish because of the lack of freely available manually prepared morphologically tagged corpora. The work presented in this thesis is made possible by the recently published Finnish dependency treebanks FinnTreeBank and Turku Dependency Treebank. Additionally, the Finnish open-source morphological analyzer OMorFi is extensively utilized in the experiments presented in the thesis. \n\nThe thesis presents methods for improving tagging accuracy, estimation speed and tagging speed in presence of large structured morphological label sets that are typical for morphologically complex languages. More specifically, it presents a novel formulation of generative morphological taggers using weighted finite-state machines and applies finite-state taggers to context sensitive spelling correction of Finnish. The thesis also explores discriminative morphological tagging. It presents structured sub-label dependencies that can be used for improving tagging accuracy. Additionally, the thesis presents a cascaded variant of the averaged perceptron tagger. In presence of large label sets, a cascaded design results in substantial reduction of estimation speed compared to a standard perceptron tagger. Moreover, the thesis explores pruning strategies for perceptron taggers. Finally, the thesis presents the FinnPos toolkit for morphological tagging. FinnPos is an open-source state-of-the-art averaged perceptron tagger implemented by the author.
Masculine personal nouns in plural nominative take on inflectional ending -owie, which is often alternative to the ending -y (more seldom -i and -e). Categorization of endings –owie // -y poses a lot of problems, as it is not influenced by morphological factors.40 pairs of alternative forms of the type astrolodzy // astrologowie; profesorzy // profesorowie; zegarmistrze // zegarmistrzowie, excerpted from a linguistic guidebook from the early 1960s, were subject to analysis. They were verified in terms of norm and frequency. The first verification was based on determinations contained in the Polish Academy of Science Great Normative Dictionary of Polish / Wielki słownik poprawnej polszczyzny PWN/, while National Corpus of Polish was the basis of the second one. Comparison of a linguistic norm from half a century ago and the contemporary one shows that not all variants considered correct 50 years ago are acceptable today. A quantitative analysis proves that the law of linguistic economy works in general, meaning that the shorter form prevails in terms of frequency (the number of syllables is the measure of length). The choice of the longer form (with ending -owie) is presumably motivated by euphonic, semantic and stylistic factors.
Detecting automatically the cause relations of a text may be useful in question answering tasks and event information extraction. The aim of this paper is to study how to detect coherence relations of the cause subgroup (Cause, Result and Purpose). To achieve this aim we have used the Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) and some automatic linguistic information from different tools developed by IXA Group. We have used a corpus of 60 scientific abstracts, the Basque RST Treebank (Iruskieta et al., 2013), of different domains: science, medicine and terminology. A linguist has annotated all the signals of that corpus and described the most important problems in such task. To report the reliability of this annotator, two linguists have annotated the signals of the cause subgroup and all the annotations were compared and evaluated. After that, a superannotator has harmonized all the signals of those cause relations. Finally, we show the most important signals for such relations.
Статтю присвячено аналізу комунікативного простору ЗМІ на предмет порушення мовних норм. Увагу зосереджено на мовному рівні сучасної інформаційної продукції. З’ясовано типологію помилок у текстах ЗМІ та причини їх виникнення. Наголошено на умінні учасників комунікативного процесу правильно користуватися засобами рідної мови, нормами, будувати висловлювання з урахуванням умов спілкування. Відповідальність за належне мовне оформлення повідомлення поділяє разом з його автором (журналістом) і редактор ЗМК, який цю інформацію оприлюднює. The article is devoted the analysis of communicative space of MASS-MEDIA for the purpose violation of linguistic norms. Attention concentrated at linguistic level of modern informative products. Tipologiyu of errors is found out in texts of MASS-MEDIA and reason of their origin. It is marked ability of participants of communicative process correctly to use facilities of the mother tongue, norms, to build an utterance taking into account the terms of intercourse. For a due linguistic registration of report divides responsibility together with his author (by a journalist) and editor ZMK, which promulgates this information.
Recent work on neural network models shows success in dependency parsing. In this paper, we present a sequence learning dependency parsing (SLDP) model using long short-term memory for shift-reduce parser. A feed-forward neural network is used to build greedy model from rich local features. With the features extracted by the local model, we further train a long short-term memory (LSTM) model optimized for global parsing sequences. Our model has the capability of learning not only atomic feature combinations automatically but also the long distance dependent information for dependency parsing. Experiments on English Penn Treebank show that our SLDP model significantly outperforms the baseline, achieving 90.7% unlabeled attachment score and 89.0% labeled attachment score.
This paper aims to provide a comprehensive modeling and representation of etymological data in digital dictionaries. The purpose is to integrate in one coherent framework both digital representations of legacy dictionaries, and also born-digital lexical databases that are constructed manually or semi-automatically. We want to propose a systematic and coherent set of modeling principles for a variety of etymological phenomena that may contribute to the creation of a continuum between existing and future lexical constructs, where anyone interested in tracing the history of words and their meanings will be able to seamlessly query lexical resources.Instead of designing an ad hoc model and representation language for digital etymological data, we will focus on identifying all the possibilities offered by the TEI guidelines for the representation of lexical information.
espanolLa actitud que debemos tomar ante la norma linguistica no puede ser la misma en todos los ambitos profesionales. Un logopeda, profesional de la rehabilitacion del lenguaje, el habla y la voz alterados, debe tener una actitud ante la norma diferente a la que debe adoptar un maestro. En este trabajo hemos tomado como instrumento de investigacion una encuesta que plantea a los logopedas en activo una serie de cuestiones acerca de que norma linguistica toman como referencia en su labor rehabilitadora. Para ello partimos de las nociones de sistema linguistico frente a norma, con una metodologia basada en las encuestas de opinion seleccionadas con el objetivo de dilucidar la actitud que estos adoptan en su proceso de intervencion logopedica. Hemos recogido encuestas de logopedas de varias comunidades linguisticas que no comparten el mismo modelo de lengua para observar que variante de lengua toman como base en sus intervenciones. EnglishThe attitude that we should have towards linguistic norm should not be the same in all professional fields. A speech and language therapist (language rehabilitation, speech and altered voice professional), must have an attitude towards different norm which a teacher must adopt. In this study, we have used a survey as a research instrument to ask active speech and language therapists a series of questions on what linguistic norms do they use as reference in their rehabilitative work. Thus, we focus our study on linguistic system notions against standard norm, with a methodology based on 2 selected opinion surveys to elucidate the adopted attitude during speech therapy intervention. Consequently, we have collected speech therapists surveys from various linguistic communities that do not share the same language model to observe which language variant do they use as a basis of their interventions.
OBJECTIVE: Examine the production of abstract and concrete nouns in patients with neurodegenerative disease using the Cookie Theft picture description. BACKGROUND: In a previous study, we observed a double dissociation in abstract and concrete word knowledge between the semantic variant of primary progressive aphasia (svPPA) and the behavioral variant of frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD). Compared to age-matched healthy controls, bvFTD patients were significantly more impaired for abstract nouns than for concrete nouns, and their poor abstract knowledge related to atrophy in the inferior frontal gyrus. In contrast, svPPA patients were significantly more impaired for concrete nouns compared to abstract nouns, associated with atrophy to the left temporal lobe. In this study, we test if the same neural regions that are critical for effective abstract and concrete word comprehension also play a role in the production of abstract and concrete words. DESIGN/METHODS: We assess the production of abstract and concrete nouns in 42 bvFTD and 21 svPPA patients using an oral description of the Cookie Theft picture. Patients met published diagnostic criteria, and concreteness or abstractness of each word was calculated using Brysbaert concreteness ratings (Brysbaert, Warriner & Kuperman, 2014). RESULTS: We observe the same double dissociation pattern during production as we previously saw with comprehension: bvFTD patients produce a smaller proportion of abstract nouns than svPPA patients. Moreover, the average concreteness rating for all nouns produced by svPPA patients is lower than for bvFTD. Regression analyses demonstrated that decreased abstract noun production in bvFTD relates to atrophy in the left inferior frontal gyrus. In addition, decreased concrete noun production in svPPA relates to atrophy in the left inferior temporal lobe. CONCLUSIONS: These results corroborate the finding that abstract and concrete nouns are represented in partially dissociable anatomic regions.
Con el desarrollo de la informática, en la investigación del lenguaje se introdujo la teoría y metodología de redes complejas, que transforma el sistema de la lengua en las redes complejas compuestas de nodos y enlaces para hacer un análisis cuantitativo de la estructura de la lengua. El desarrollo de la gramática de dependencias proporciona un apoyo teórico a la construcción del corpus anotado (treebank), por lo que el análisis estadístico con las redes complejas se hace posible. Este artículo presenta la teoría y metodología de las redes complejas y construye las redes sintácticas de dependencia a base del corpus anotado (treebank) de las expresiones orales del examen EEE-4 (Examen del Español como Especialidad - Nivel 4). Mediante el análisis de las características generales de las redes, incluyendo el número de nodos, los enlaces, el grado medio, la longitud media de los caminos, la distribución de grados y la centralización, tiene como objetivo descubrir la diferencia y similitud potencial entre las expresiones orales de distintos niveles. Además, con el análisis de conglomerados, esta investigación pretende demostrar la capacidad discriminatoria de las variables de las redes complejas y proporcionar una referencia potencial para el trabajo de calificación.
Discourse connectives (e.g. however, because) are terms that can explicitly convey a discourse relation within a text. While discourse connectives have been shown to be an effective clue to automatically identify discourse relations, they are not always used to convey such relations, thus they should first be disambiguated between discourse-usage non-discourse-usage. In this paper, we investigate the applicability of features proposed for the disambiguation of English discourse connectives for French. Our results with the French Discourse Treebank (FDTB) show that syntactic and lexical features developed for English texts are as effective for French and allow the disambiguation of French discourse connectives with an accuracy of 94.2%.
Facial expressions are one of the most important types of non-verbal communication. Although interpretation of facial expressions is usually robust, studies have shown that both age-related and disease-related factors can influence recognition accuracy. In particular, older people show deficits in recognition of negative expressions. Similarly, patients suffering from Parkinson's disease (PD) also show impairments in recognition of fear, anger, and disgust expressions. These studies so far have only focused on the basic, or "universal" expressions. Here, we were interested in investigating and comparing the effects of age and disease on facial expression processing for a wider range of both emotional and communicational expressions. For our ongoing study we recruited a total of 79 participants: 20 PD patients, 15 age-matched, older healthy controls (HC), and 44 younger healthy controls (HCS). During the experiment, participants were instructed to watch videos of 27 facial expressions performed by 6 different actors and to rate each expression based on 12 evaluative dimensions (arousal, valence, naturalness, politeness, persuasiveness, dynamic, familiarity, empathy, honesty, attractiveness, intelligence, and outgoingness) using a 7-point Likert scale. Ratings were analyzed using within-group and across-group correlations, factor analysis, and item analyses. Overall, we found that ratings of expressions were more different due to age, than due to disease-prevalence: r(PD/HC)=.756 versus r(PD/HCS)=.627, r(HC/HCS)=.640. Three out of six factors in the factor analysis were common for all groups (arousal-dynamic, familiarity-empathy, and naturalness-sincerity), showing common evaluation patterns. Confirming earlier findings of a "positivity effect", valence ratings of negative expressions were higher for both older groups (although valence ratings highly correlated within-group: all r>.919). Similarly, negative expression were perceived as more natural but less persuasive by both older groups. Overall, our results show that age-related factors play a much larger role than PD-related factors in processing of both emotional and communicational facial expressions. Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2016
This paper aims at filling the gap between the accuracy of Italian and English constituency parsing: firstly, we adapt the Bllip parser, i.e., the most accurate constituency parser for English, also known as Charniak parser, for Italian and trained it on the Turin University Treebank (TUT). Secondly, we design a parse reranker based on Support Vector Machines using tree kernels, where the latter can effectively generalize syntactic patterns, requiring little training data for training the model. We show that our approach outperforms the state of the art achieved by the Berkeley parser, improving it from 84.54 to 86.81 in labeled F1.
In this paper, the importance of “culture” is focused on regarding its relation to second/foreign language acquisition/learning. By reinterpreting the Iceberg Model of Culture, the author thinks that second/foreign language learners are exposed to the dominant culture with its social and linguistic norms and therefore they experience deculturalization, which also brings about the issue of the Self and the Other. It is suggested in the paper that a shift from communicative competence (CC) to intercultural communicative competence (ICC) in multicultural second/foreign language classes per se could enhance language learning by involving these learners’ native culture elements in the language learning/teaching process. While the paper illustrates some pedagogical implications that such a shift could entail, it concludes that introducing these practices in multicultural second/foreign language classes have the potential to enable both practitioners and learners to deal with power relations and the deculturalizing forces, which might be prevalent in such classes.
We tackle the challenge of learning part-of-speech classified translations as part of an inversion transduction grammar, by learning translations for English words with known part-of-speech tags, both from existing translation lexica and from parallel corpora. When translating from a low resource language into English, we can expect to have rich resources for English, such as treebanks, and small amounts of bilingual resources, such as translation lexica and parallel corpora. We solve the problem of integrating these heterogeneous resources into a single model using stochastic Inversion Transduction Grammars, which we augment with wildcards to handle unknown translations.
Facial expressions frequently involve multiple individual facial actions. How do facial actions combine to create emotionally meaningful expressions? Infants produce positive and negative facial expressions at a range of intensities. It may be that a given facial action can index the intensity of both positive (smiles) and negative (cry-face) expressions. Objective, automated measurements of facial action intensity were paired with continuous ratings of emotional valence to investigate this possibility. Degree of eye constriction (the Duchenne marker) and mouth opening were each uniquely associated with smile intensity and, independently, with cry-face intensity. In addition, degree of eye constriction and mouth opening were each unique predictors of emotion valence ratings. Eye constriction and mouth opening index the intensity of both positive and negative infant facial expressions, suggesting parsimony in the early communication of emotion.
The study examined the relationship between idiom familiarity, knowledge of idiom meaning and idiom transparency judgments in L2. A group of 23 intermediate Japanese learners of English were asked to provide familiarity ratings, transparency judgments, and definitions for 30 English idioms, 27 of which had semantically equivalent but compositionally different idiomatic counterparts in Japanese and 3 phrases for which semantic equivalents in L1 also shared the same structural properties. Transparency ratings were repeated after the instructional treatment. A comparison of pre-treatment and post-treatment transparency scores showed that knowledge of conventional idiom meanings had a strong effect on the learners’ perceptions of idiom transparency. Transparency judgments, however, were not found to be a reliable predictor of the learners’ ability to infer figurative meanings of the idiomatic phrases. Idiom familiarity was not found to have a significant effect on idiom comprehension or on transparency judgments either. A limited positive effect of language transfer on L2 idiom comprehension and transparency ratings was observed.
Semantic lexical similarity and relatedness are important issues in natural language processing (NLP). Similarity and relatedness are not the same, while they are very closely related. To date, in many works these two issues are mixed up which harm system’s effectiveness. A popular approach to measure semantic similarity and relatedness is utilizing WordNet, a lexical database. This paper shows that Wordnet’s gloss is a potential source for measuring semantic relatedness. Experiment result using WordSim353 relatedness database confirms the effectiveness of the approach.
The aim of the current study was to investigate if Openness – to – Experience and Neuroticism personality traits are associated with curiosity. This will help us to estimate whether knowledge expansion is dependent on a person’s personality and which trait is more willing to invest time on learning. The experiment consisted of two different sessions. To estimate curiosity, 40 subjects first performed a word-synonymy task, where Shannon’s (1948) entropy was estimated and the result of which lead to the measurement of uncertainty. Then in a second session, participants had the option to request for feedback between a few alternative options at a cost (time), and they were also required to estimate their satisfaction about the answer on a valence rating scale. Finally, participants were screened for personality traits. Neurotic individuals appeared to be more willing in investing time on feedback request, in contrast to open individuals.
Due to the constant increasing of electronic textual information, modern society needs for the automatic processing of natural language (NL). The main purpose of NL automatic text processing systems is to analyze and create texts and represent their content. The purpose of the paper is the development of linguistic and software bases of an automatic system for processing English publicistic texts. This article discusses the examples of different approaches to the creation of linguistic databases for processing systems. The author gives a detailed description of basic building blocks for a new linguistic processor: lexicalsemantic, syntactical and semantic-syntactical. The main advantage of the processor is using special semantic codes in the alphabetical dictionary. The semantic codes have been developed in accordance with a lexical-semantic classification. It helps to precisely define semantic functions of the keywords that are situated in parsing groups and allows the automatic system to avoid typical mistakes. The author also represents the realization of a developed linguistic database in the form of a training computer program.
The paper compares the grammar handbook <i>Gyakorlati Ilir Nyelvtan</i> (Baja, 1874, <sup>2</sup>1881) by Mihálovics with Mažuranić's <i>Slovnica Hèrvatska</i> (<sup>4</sup>1869), as Mažuranić is mentioned in the foreword as the normative model used in the handbook. This comparison will include their terminology, purpose, structure, and normative prescription, and will determine in which cases Mihálovics follows Mažuranić’s grammar and in which he distances himself from it. Since the grammar handbook was published outside the Croatian (ethnic and linguistic) area, the paper will show to what extent the characteristics of the Croatian linguistic norm were preserved in the Hungarian part of the Danube Region in the late 19<sup>th</sup> century.