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18265 papers
Earlier studies have demonstrated emotional overreactions to affective visual stimuli in patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD). However, contradictory findings regarding hyper- versus hyporeactivity have been reported for peripheral physiological measures. In order to extend previous results, the authors investigated emotional reactivity and long-term habituation in the acoustic modality. Twenty-two female BPD patients and 19 female nonclinical controls listened to emotionally negative, neutral, and positive sounds in two identical sessions. Heart rate, skin conductance, zygomaticus/corrugator muscle, and self-reported valence/arousal responses were measured. BPD patients showed weaker skin conductance responses to negative sounds than controls. The elevated zygomaticus activity in response to positive sounds observed in controls was absent in BPD patients, and BPD patients assigned lower valence ratings to positive sounds than controls. In Session 2, patients recognized fewer positive sounds than controls. Across both groups, physiological measures habituated between sessions. These findings add to growing evidence toward partial affective hyporeactivity in BPD.
Universal Dependencies is a project that seeks to develop cross-linguistically consistent treebank annotation for many languages, with the goal of facilitating multilingual parser development, cross-lingual learning, and parsing research from a language typology perspective. The annotation scheme is based on (universal) Stanford dependencies (de Marneffe et al., 2006, 2008, 2014), Google universal part-of-speech tags (Petrov et al., 2012), and the Interset interlingua for morphosyntactic tagsets (Zeman, 2008). This is the second release of UD Treebanks, Version 1.1.
Using functional near-infrared spectroscopy, the present study investigated how listening to differently valenced music is associated with changes in hemoglobin concentrations in the prefrontal cortex area, indicating changes in neural activity. Thirty healthy people (15 men; M age = 24.8 yr., SD = 2.4; 15 women; M age = 25.2 yr., SD = 3.1) participated. Prefrontal cortex activation, emotional responses (heart rate variability), and self-reported affective ratings were measured while listening to calm and motivational music. The songs were presented in a random counterbalanced order and separated by periods of white noise. Mixed-model repeated-measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) evaluated the relationships for main effects and interactions. The results showed that music was associated with increased activation of the prefrontal cortex area. For both sexes, listening to the motivational song was associated with higher vagal withdrawal (lower HR) than the calm song. As expected, participants rated the motivational song with greater affective valence and higher arousal. Effects persisted longer in men than in women. These findings suggest that both the characteristics of music and sex differences may significantly affect the results of emotional neuroimaging in samples of young adults.
In the present study, we raised the question of whether valence information of natural emotional sounds can be extracted rapidly and unintentionally. In a first experiment, we collected explicit valence ratings of brief natural sound segments. Results showed that sound segments of 400 and 600 ms duration-and with some limitation even sound segments as short as 200 ms-are evaluated reliably. In a second experiment, we introduced an auditory version of the affective Simon task to assess automatic (i.e. unintentional and fast) evaluations of sound valence. The pattern of results indicates that affective information of natural emotional sounds can be extracted rapidly (i.e. after a few hundred ms long exposure) and in an unintentional fashion.
The ontological approach to the creation of the learning process support systems is proposed. We research the method for automated creation of learning ontologies based on computational linguistics algorithms, the method of analysis of lexical-semantic fields corps of texts in Russian and English, frequency dictionaries of terms. Using the lexical database WordNet and terminological dictionaries the prototype ontology was developed and uploaded into the software tool "OntoMASTER-Ontology" for refining by experts. The developed method is used for creating ontologies to support the learning process of students in the field of "Information systems and technologies".
Abstract. This paper proposes a hierarchical model to parse both En-glish and Chinese sentences. This is done by iteratively constructing simple constituents first, so that complex ones could be detected reliably with richer contextual information in the following processes. Evalua-tion on the Penn WSJ Treebank and the Penn Chinese Treebank using maximum entropy models shows that our method can achieve a good performance with more flexibility for future improvement.
The usage of phrasemes evidences not only their variability, transformations and modifications, but also the most frequent forms of their realization (phraseme-types) and frequency (phraseme-tokens), i.e. phrasemes’ flexibility. In this paper, selected Lithuanian idiomatic predicate phrasemes are analysed in the Corpus of Contemporary Lithuanian Language, in the Phraseological Dictionary and in the lexical database of the Dictionary of Lithuanian Phrases. The results of comparison show that the corpus research can give rich evidence about the morphological flexibility of phrasemes. This information can help to improve representation of phrasemes in the phraseological dictionaries of Lithuanian, in order to make them more usage-based and more usage-oriented.
Large-scale data resources needed for progress toward natural language understanding are not yet widely available and typically require considerable expense and expertise to create. This paper addresses the problem of developing scalable approaches to annotating semantic frames and explores the viability of crowdsourcing for the task of frame disambiguation. We present a novel supervised crowdsourcing paradigm that incorporates insights from human computation research designed to accommodate the relative complexity of the task, such as exemplars and real-time feedback. We show that non-experts can be trained to perform accurate frame disambiguation, and can even identify errors in gold data used as the training exemplars. Results demonstrate the efficacy of this paradigm for semantic annotation requiring an intermediate level of expertise. 1 The semantic bottleneck Behind every great success in speech and language lies a great corpus—or at least a very large one. Advances in speech recognition, machine translation and syntactic parsing can be traced to the availability of large-scale annotated resources (Wall Street Journal, Europarl and Penn Treebank, respectively) providing crucial supervised input to statistically learned models. Semantically annotated resources have been comparatively harder to come by: representing meaning poses myriad philosophical, theoretical and practical challenges, particularly for general purpose resources that can be applied to diverse domains. If these challenges can be addressed, however, semantic resources hold significant potential for fueling progress beyond shallow syntax and toward deeper language understanding. This paper explores the feasibility of developing scalable methodologies for semantic annotation, inspired by three strands of work. First, frame semantics, and its instantiation in the Berkeley FrameNet project (Fillmore and Baker, 2010), offers a principled approach to representing meaning. FrameNet is a lexicographic resource that captures syntactic and semantic generalizations that go beyond surface form and part of speech, famously including the relationships among words like buy, sell, purchase and price. These rich structural relations provide an attractive foundation for work in deeper natural language understanding and inference, as attested by the breadth of applications at the Workshop in Honor of Chuck Fillmore at ACL 2014 (Petruck and de Melo, 2014). But FrameNet was not designed to support scalable language technologies; indeed, it is perhaps a paradigm example of a hand-curated knowledge resource, one that has required significant expertise, training, time and expense to create and that remains under development. Second, the task of automatic semantic role labeling (ASRL) (Gildea and Jurafsky, 2002) serves as an applied counterpart to the ideas of frame semantics. Recent progress has demonstrated the viability of training automated models using frameannotated data (Das et al., 2013; Das et al., 2010; Johansson and Nugues, 2006). Results based on FrameNet data have been limited by its incomplete
This study examines what effect mindfulness has on anxiety and memory levels in comparison to a suppression and control group. Participants underwent natural, suppression, and mindful conditions while being shown a series of positive and negative images and rating how happy/unhappy (valence) they felt and how excited/calm (arousal). After answering a series of questionnaires, participants were tested on their recall levels. The results revealed that arousal and valence ratings of the pictures were not significantly different across conditions, and neither was the recall of the participants. The results of this experiment do not align with previous research and may be due to a few limitations within the study. Therefore, more studies will need to be conducted and further research will need to be completed.
Faced with the need to access information in various languages about the cultural heritage of Italy, or to translate documents concerning this heritage, the “Lessico multilingue dei Beni Culturali” research group of Florence University has proposed creating a multilingual website in seven languages for the development of a cultural heritage lexicon dedicated to the city of Florence. In its pilot phase, this website will consist of a sample number of comparative lexical databases and a multilingual dictionary. The database texts on which the dictionary editors will base their work have been chosen for the purpose of combining the classic description of Florence’s cultural heritage with its contemporary reinterpretation: a database of the translations of Vasari's Lives, a key work for describing this heritage, and a database of the translations of tour guides of Florence. The examples offered for the Russian language illustrate the need to reserve an important role in the lexical card of the multilingual Portal not only to the grammatical description of the terms, but also to their graphic form, to their definition, if possible with a reflection on the etymology that takes the origins and the history of the word into account. Quotations from the original literature as well as from translations are equally important. This project can constitute an important advance in helping both the general and the specialized public to improve their understanding of cultural heritage issues.
Paninian Grammar framework provides a better solution for parsing free word order languages and Stanford Parser gives the dependencies for English language (Fixed word order language). In this paper, we map the Stanford parser dependencies to karaka relations. By using VerbNet, we capture the syntax and semantics of verb. We present the issues that encounter while doing adaptation and proposed solution to overcome these problems. We are using Hindi Dependency parser for verification of results. With this adaptation of Stanford Parser, an English-Hindi parallel treebank can be created.
This paper is meant as a brief description of the Romanian syntax within the dependency framework, more specifically within the Universal Dependency (UD) framework, and is the result of a volunteer activity of mapping two independently created Romanian dependency treebanks to the UD specifications. This mapping process is not trivial, as concessions have to be made and solutions need to be found for various language specific phenomena. We highlight the specific characteristics of the UD relations in Romanian and argument the need for other relations. If they have already been defined for (an)other language(s) in the UD project, we adopt them.
Developing a practical and accurate statistical parser for low-resourced languages is a hard problem, because it requires large-scale treebanks, which are expensive and labor-intensive to build from scratch. Unsupervised grammar induction theoretically offers a way to overcome this hurdle by learning hidden syntactic structures from raw text automatically. The accuracy of grammar induction is still impractically low because frequent collocations of non-linguistically associable units are commonly found, resulting in dependency attachment errors. We introduce a novel approach to building a statistical parser for low-resourced languages by using language parameters as a guide for grammar induction. The intuition of this paper is: most dependency attachment errors are frequently used word orders which can be captured by a small prescribed set of linguistic constraints, while the rest of the language can be learned statistically by grammar induction. We then show that covering the most frequent grammar rules via our language parameters has a strong impact on the parsing accuracy in 12 languages.
This article deals with the regularization of non-standard spellings of the verbal forms extracted from a corpus. It addresses the question of what the limits of regularization are when lemmatizing Old English weak verbs. The purpose of such regularization, also known as normalization, is to carry out lexicological analysis or lexicographical work. The analysis concentrates on weak verbs from the second class and draws on the lexical database of Old English Nerthus, which has incorporated the texts of the Dictionary of Old English Corpus. As regards the question of the limits of normalization, the solution adopted are, in the first place, that when it is necessary to regularize, normalization is restricted to correspondences based on dialectal and diachronic variation and, secondly, that normalization has to be unidirectional.
In this paper, we show an approach to extracting \ndifferent types of constraint rules \nfrom a dependency treebank. Also, we \nshow an approach to integrating these constraint \nrules into a dependency data-driven \nparser, where these constraint rules inform \nparsing decisions in specific situations \nwhere a set of parsing rule (which is \ninduced from a classifier) may recommend \nseveral recommendations to the parser. \nOur experiments have shown that parsing \naccuracy could be improved by using different \nsets of constraint rules in combination \nwith a set of parsing rules. Our parser \nis based on the arc-standard algorithm of \nMaltParser but with a number of extensions, \nwhich we will discuss in some detail.
The Contradictions of Samuel Beckett Andre Furlani (bio) Beyond New Critical Paradox “He could have shouted and could not,” begins Samuel Beckett’s first published story, “Assumption.”1 It appeared in transition in 1929 just as Ludwig Wittgenstein began an epochal reestimation of the peculiar sense such a contradiction can make. The philosopher told his students at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1933 that the purported “law” of contradiction (the rule forbidding statements of the order “p & ~p”) is really a set of norms, “which may recommend itself highly. This does not mean that we cannot use a contradiction. In fact it is used, for example, in the statement ‘I like it and don’t like it.’”2 This is not mere semantics. “If we say a thing can’t at the same time be both red and not-red, we mean that in our system we have not given this any meaning” (Wittgenstein’s Lectures, 72). Beckett continues this rehabilitation of contradiction, showing its legitimate operation in specific language games and the extent to which language games subtend even the most verifiable utterances. Wittgenstein proposes that the agreement in getting a result is the justification of a technique, be it a mathematical proof, logical proposition, or empirical statement; this agreement is not logical but grammatical.3 Contradiction in Beckett similarly need be neither an absurdist or existential device, nor an instance of aporia and infinite undecidability; instead, it can be a paradigmatic manifestation of what Wittgenstein calls the “elasticity” of linguistic norms (Wittgenstein’s Lectures, 72). While recent scholarship continues to elucidate Beckett’s philosophical sources and complements, Wittgenstein is seldom [End Page 449] addressed, despite the fact he was one of the few modern philosophers Beckett was interested in.4 Scholars have long surmised an acquaintance with the arguments of the Tractatus, as suggested by the novels Murphy and Watt, but Beckett’s relationship with Wittgenstein proves to be more intensive and prolonged.5 Beckett’s Paris library, catalogued and clarified by Mark Nixon and Dirk Van Hulle, contains a wide range of books both by and about Wittgenstein that has no equivalent among his collections of modern philosophy. These include German and English editions of the Tractatus, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief, and the 1960 two-volume edition of the collected works (Schriften), published by his own German publisher Siegfried Unseld at Suhrkamp. 6 In addition to the Tractatus, it contains Philosophische Untersuchungen (Philosophical Investigations), Philosophische Bemerkungen (Philosophical Remarks), and Tagebücher 1914–1916 (Notebooks 1914–1916), an early version of the Tractatus.7 The Schriften was no mere bookshelf embellishment, for Beckett acquired a secondary literature on the philosopher. In addition to owning the supplementary Suhrkamp Beiheft, which he annotated, Ulrich Steinvorth’s edited collection(?), Über Ludwig Wittgenstein, Beckett read David Pole’s and the Suhrkamp volume Über Ludwig Wittgenstein, Beckett read David Pole’s The Later Philosophy of Wittgenstein, writing to Barbara Bray on December 21, 1962, that he was “reading Pole on Wittgenstein again.”8 He extensively annotated Bertrand Russell’s introduction to the Tractatus. He also read memoirs containing much explication of the philosopher’s earlier and later thinking, including Ludwig Wittgenstein, Personal Recollections, edited by Rush Rhees, and Paul Engelmann’s Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein with a Memoir. A September 17, 1967, letter to Bray reports that he has received the German translation of Norman Malcolm’s Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir (Samuel Beckett Papers, MS 10948/1/402), while a New Year’s Day 1971 letter thanks Mary Hutchinson for its English edition: “Wittgenstein book safely arrived. Very glad to have it” (quoted in Nixon and Van Hulle, Samuel Beckett’s Library, 167). Associates of Beckett’s also testified to his interest in Wittgenstein. John Fletcher recalled Beckett telling him that he had been reading Wittgenstein since the late 1950s, the theater technician Duncan Scott recalled a conversation with Beckett about the Tractatus in the 1970s, and André Bernold recalled Beckett telling him in 1984 that he had been reading Wittgenstein.9 The philosopher E. M. Cioran published a memoir of Beckett in 1976 that stressed his friend’s similarity to Wittgenstein, while Bray, who met Beckett when she...
This dissertation examines the tensions at work in contemporary French cultural politics between, on the one hand, homogenizing/assimilating hegemonic tendencies and, on the other hand, performances of heterogeneity/disharmony especially in literature but also in other artistic forms such as music. “Regional literature/culture” and “banlieue (ghetto) literature/culture” are studied as two major phenomena that performatively go against France’s “state monolingualism,” here understood as much as a “one-language policy” as the enforcement of “one discourse about Frenchness” (mono-logos). I rely on Jacques Rancière’s notions of “archipolitics” and “aesthetic regimes” to suggest that May 1968 has constituted an epistemological shift which has made it possible for alternate French discourses to emerge and become perceptible. Literatures displaying such discourses (either regional-related or immigration-related or both) are termed “accented literatures,” with “accent” being defined both as “variation from the linguistic norm” and “variation from the discursive norm.” These “accented literatures” become a distinctive trait of “democracy,” or “agonistic community,” allowing space for disharmonic representations of the “French” “nation.” Regarding regional (Alsatian) literature, I focus on André Weckmann’s literary use of magical surrealism and of a dialogic “Germanic French language”; regarding immigrant identity and banlieue literature, I first explicate the profound implications, for banlieue literature as a whole, of the “two-generation theory” developed by Algeria-born French rapper and writer Mounsi, with Azouz Begag’s literary production as a case study. Then turning to Abd al Malik, a French rapper/writer/filmmaker of Congolese origin, I pinpoint his concept of “pacific, new French revolution” as an ultimate form of accentuation of French discourse, scrutinizing the ways in which his art performs Frenchness as well as Islam. Because the notion of “accent” is closely linked to those of “prestige” and “legitimacy vs. lack thereof,” this dissertation eventually leads to a redefinition of “legitimate culture” in France. As a practical consequence of these literary-political debates, I advocate for the teaching, within the French public school system, of both regional languages and immigrant languages such as Arabic as a way to address identity challenges specific to the contemporary postcolonial era.
Abstract The two main classes of grammars are (a) hand-crafted grammars, which are developed by language experts, and (b) data-driven grammars, which are extracted from annotated corpora. This paper introduces a statistical method for mapping the elementary structures of a data-driven grammar onto the elementary structures of a hand-crafted grammar in order to combine their advantages. The idea is employed in the context of Lexicalized Tree-Adjoining Grammars (LTAG) and tested on two LTAGs of English: the hand-crafted LTAG developed in the XTAG project, and the data-driven LTAG, which is automatically extracted from the Penn Treebank and used by the MICA parser. We propose a statistical model for mapping any elementary tree sequence of the MICA grammar onto a proper elementary tree sequence of the XTAG grammar. The model has been tested on three subsets of the WSJ corpus that have average lengths of 10, 16, and 18 words, respectively. The experimental results show that full-parse trees with average F 1 -scores of 72.49, 64.80, and 62.30 points could be built from 94.97%, 96.01%, and 90.25% of the XTAG elementary tree sequences assigned to the subsets, respectively. Moreover, by reducing the amount of syntactic lexical ambiguity of sentences, the proposed model significantly improves the efficiency of parsing in the XTAG system.
One avenue for supporting the continued use and revitalization of endangered languages in the current, pervasively computerized world is the creation of computational models of the often rich and complex morphology of these languages. Such computational models can be used as a basis for creating a suite of reader’s and writer’s tools, including e.g. (1) an intelligent electronic dictionary that combines the computational model and a lexical database allowing for linking any inflected form with the appropriate dictionary entry, as well as the generation of word paradigms, (2) an intelligent computer-aided language learning application (ICALL) that allows for the dynamic generation of large numbers of exercises combining the entire core vocabulary (up to several thousand of the most common words) and a substantially smaller set of exercise templates, and (3) a spell-checker that supports adherence with one or more existing orthographical conventions, and thus the production of good-quality texts. Importantly, these tools can be made publicly available over the Internet and integrated as part of general software applications such as web browsers and word processors, to be used with little or no cost by any speakers or language-learners in the respective communities as well as any researchers, anywhere – instead of remaining on an individual researcher’s computer drive or on a library bookshelf. Based on our recent experiences on trying out various practical approaches in developing computational morphological models for Plains Cree and Northern Haida, using Finite-State Transducer (FST) technology (Beesley & Karttunen, 2003), once one gains access both to (a) a comprehensive set of full word paradigms, for every possible paradigm type, and (b) an accompanying extensive electronic lexical resource with coding indicating the relevant paradigm type, we have been able to create surprisingly rapidly, potentially within only several months, initial but already full-fledged FST models that can be readily adapted into the aforementioned software tools (1-3). Nevertheless, these first versions will certainly benefit from further work, where one cannot do without the active participation of the language community. However, we will demonstrate how, when a researcher or community linguist pays careful attention in their lexical documentation work on the systematic and detailed coding of the morphological characteristics of the vocabulary in some structured electronic format (e.g. when using software such as ToolBox), they will at the same time facilitate the rapid initial development of computational tools which will make benefits of their work available to the entire community. References Beesley, Kenneth R. and Lauri Karttunen. 2003. Finite State Morphology. Stanford (CA): CSLI Publications.
Wide-coverage resources for lexicalized grammars have been obtained by converting the existing treebanks into collections of derivations. Additional annotations to the source treebank can be used to improve these derivations. A treebank annotation called the NTT treebank was used for this paper to improve a CCGbank for Japanese. The source treebank of the CCGbank itself is created by automatically converting chunk-dependencies, but the CCGbank contains errors caused by noisier phrase structures and a lack of linguistic information, which is difficult to represent in chunk-dependency. The NTT treebank provides cleaner trees and functional and semantic information, e.g., coordinations and predicate-argument structures. The effect of the improvement process is empirically evaluated in terms of the changes in the dependency relations extracted from the resulting derivations.
The various views to the sovietness and the opposite tendencies of desovietization and resovietization are observed in different spheres of modern Russian society, including in language. This article is devoted to the consideration of the (anti-) sovietness in modern Russian discourse and meta-discourse about modern Russian language. In the modern Russian language there is a clear tendency to deviate from the previous linguistic norms, and the substandard units widely intruded in the literary language. This article analyzes the desovietization shifts in the system of functional styles, language play and the parodic use of sovietisms as a precedent text. As the desovietization of modern Russian language and the violation of norms consistently increases, the protection of language purity is called for to a great extent. Under puristic approach toward Russian language inviolability of linguistic norms and ideality of language of the past are emphasized, and any language innovations are rejected. Especially the aspiration to the ideal language and non-recognition of language variation remind of the Soviet puristic ideology. Soviet puristic ideology was aimed at compliance of spontaneous oral speech with standardized written language and thereby at the unification of the mass language use.
Many algorithms for natural language processing rely on manual feature engineering. However, manually finding effective features is a labor-intensive task. Moreover, whenever these algorithms are applied on new types of content, they do not perform that well anymore and new features need to be engineered. For example, current algorithms developed for Part-of-Speech (PoS) tagging of news articles with Penn Treebank tags perform poorly on microposts posted on social media. As an example, the state-of-the-art Stanford tagger trained on news article data reaches an accuracy of 73% when PoS tagging microposts. When the Stanford tagger is retrained on micropost data and new micropost-specific features are added, an accuracy of 88.7% can be obtained. We show that we can achieve state-of-the-art performance for PoS tagging of Twitter microposts by solely relying on automatically inferred distributed word representations as features and a neural network. To automatically infer the distributed word representations, we make use of 400 million Twitter microposts. Next, we feed a context window of distributed word representations around the word we want to tag to a neural network to predict the corresponding PoS tag. To initialize the weights of the neural network, we pre-train it with large amounts of automatically high-confidence labeled Twitter microposts. Using a data-driven approach, we finally achieve a state-of-the-art accuracy of 88.9% when tagging Twitter microposts with Penn Treebank tags.
The article discusses the issues of teachers’ speech culture which is an important component of pedagogical culture. Mastering the linguistic norms is one of the topical questions of increasing the teachers’ pedagogical culture which are considered at the professional development courses “Russian as State Language” realized by department of language and literary education of the Chelyabinsk Institute of Retraining and Improvement of Professional Skill of Educators the framework of implementing the Federal targeted program “Russian language”. These courses are designed for various categories of educators: to specialists of educational governances of the Russian Federation; to specialists of educational governances of municipal education; to heads and deputy heads of educational institutions; to teachers of Russian language and literature; to teachers of other subjects, specialists of the preschool education system. The work aimed at developing the educators’ culture of speech should be considered as an important means contributing to the functioning of the Russian language as a state language of the Russian Federation.
The paper aims to evaluate the semantic -terminological effect on the use of the Latin lexicon that are shaped by a particular author, given the complete documentation of the occurrences of his lemmata (Index Thomisticus), further supplied by on-going syntactic annotation, but nevertheless requiring proper, theoretically well-founded semantic analysis and lexicographic production. We propose linking the rich theoretical tradition which has produced the Prague Dependency Treebank (PDT) and the correlated Tectogrammatical Annotation (TGA) to the objectives of the Bicultural Thomistic Lexicon (LTB). To do this, we will examine and discuss Havrnek's contribution to the shaping of standard language, especially through the distinctive, creative procedure he calls intellectualisation. At the same time, we will outline the effect determined by the use -established in all its extensions -of an expression (lexical item or noun phrase). Given that the user -Thomas Aquinas -was an author who profoundly influenced subsequent thought, the creation or codification of a terminological value of the item will be investigated.
The mood in a conversation is estimated by examining the speakers' affective states. Developing the automatic mood recognition system is one of the bigest issues in smooth communication research of human-human and human-computer/robot interactions. In this research, the affective rating data in UUDB (Utsunomiya University Spoken Dialogue Database) is used as the speakers' affective states. Twenty participants heard speech data and they were asked to rate the mood for each five utterances of the dialogue in the UUDB. The head-counts of participant, who considered the mood as bad/negative for the utterance blocks, are modeled by the Poisson regression modeling technique. The results demonstrate that the model is able to estimate the mood in a conversation by utilizing the speakers' affective states before the target utterance block. Thus the current study indicates that it is possible for a computer/robot to infer mood and it is possible to have effective human-to-computer/robot communications.
Information presented in graphical form can better perceive the data for analysis and further processing. Large selection of software packages for graphics peculiarities associated with the presentation of graphical information and the need to solve specific tasks. The use of software for image processing in different sectors of human activity raises the task review the relevant analytical software. For the analysis of selected software products best known for working with raster, vector and fractal graphics. An analytical review of software products and graphics imaging rating of set the intensity of their use. The classification software and presented its component structure. Based on the developed classifications created software selection rule. Results of the work make it possible to identify the components of an existing software needs further improvement and development and is the basis for new software. Graphic editor selection formula is reduced to coincidence the relevant user-defined classifications. Prospects for future research is the improvement and development of individual instruments photo editor.
UC Berkeley Phonology Lab Annual Report (2015) Single URs vs. allomorphy: The case of Babanki coda consonant deletion Pius W. Akumbu University of Buea, Cameroon 1 Introduction The purpose of this paper is to account for a number of phonological alternations that occur on nouns, verbs, deverbal adjectives, and pronouns at the postlexical level in Babanki, a Grassfields Bantu language spoken in Cameroon. 2 The alternation involves the deletion of certain coda consonants between two underlying vowels. This can be illustrated by the deletion of /ŋ/ which is accompanied by the raising of /a/ and /o/ to [o] and [u] respectively (Mutaka & Phubon 2006): 3 (1) əsaŋ ‘corn’ əsɔŋ ‘tooth’ akwəŋ ‘arms’ əsō: ghɔmə ‘my corn’ əsū: ghɔmə ‘my tooth’ akwə: ghɔmə ‘my arms’ /əsaŋ ə ghomə/ /əsoŋ ə ghomə/ /əkwəŋ a ghomə/ These changes fail to occur if /ŋ/ is not followed by a vowel in the underlying representation (UR), as illustrated in the second example in (2). (2) əkaŋ kəkaŋ ‘dishes’ ‘dish’ əko: wiʔ ‘a person’s dishes’ kəkaŋ kə wiʔ ‘a person’s dish’ /əkaŋ ə wiʔ/ /kəkaŋ kə wiʔ/ There are two possible ways to account for these changes, namely, a rule- or constraint- based phonological analysis which starts with an input from which an output is derived, and a precompiled phonology approach in which allomorphs are listed with appropriate frames where they are inserted (Hayes 1990). In the first approach, proposed underlying segmental forms are exactly as they would occur in isolation, for This paper was written during my stay at the University of California, Berkeley as a Fulbright research scholar (Sept. 1, 2015 - May 31, 2016) and I would like to sincerely thank Larry Hyman for his invaluable input at all stages of the life of this paper. Although native speakers of the language prefer to use Kejom when referring both to the language and the two villages where it is spoken, I have chosen Babanki, the administrative name by which the language and the people are widely known. The rest of the data in this paper are drawn from a lexical database of 2000 entries in Filemaker Pro™.
Unconditioned stimulus(US) devaluation has been put forward as an effective measure to decrease fear response. Previous studies mostly focused on investigating the impact of US devaluation in the test phase after fear acquisition. As widely recognized, exposure therapy based on the theory of extinction training is a frequently used method for the treatment of mental disorders. Hence, we made an attempt to implement this program in the extinction training to examine if it could improve the therapeutic effect. In addition, to further understand the mechanisms of US devaluation, evaluative conditioning was explored.An experiment was designed to test the impact of reduction in US intensity on conditioned fear extinction.All participants were subjected to a fear conditioning experiment consisted of acquisition, US devaluation and extinction phases while subjective US-expectancy and skin conductance response(SCR)were rated online. In the experiment, the intensity of US was decreased after acquisition for one group(devaluation) and held constant for another group(control). Two simple geometrical figures served as CS+ and CS?, and a 1-sec female vocal stimulus(i.e., scream) as US. Each CS+ was paired with a US during the acquisition phase, and in the subsequent devaluation phrase, subjects were only exposed to the intensity-changed US for three times. To measure evaluative conditioning, participants were required to rate CS-valence at the end of each conditioning phase.The results show that US-expectancy to CS+ was not significantly different between two groups, which seemed to reflect a similar mode of fear extinction. However, the SCR to CS+ of devaluation groupwas significantly lower than that of control group, suggesting an efficient promoted process of fear extinction by US revaluation. The effect of US devaluation was also found in evaluative conditioning. Compared to control group,devaluation group showed more positive valence ratings for CS+.The results suggest that US devaluation did promote the extinction according to the SCR. Through the US devaluation, the explicit awareness of CS-US bond did not change; but the SCR, representing a procedural fear memory formed by implicit learning, had been influenced, which declared a separation between different fear response indexes. From the evaluating conditioning results, we inferred that US might have served as a transporter, to transform the negative valence to CS. After devaluation, individuals might restate the cognition of CS fear valence, leading to the promotion of extinction. The results suggest that the modulation of US intensity may provide a new perspective for exposure therapy. Based on relevant literature review, the knowledge of the internal mechanisms of US devaluation that influence the conditioned fear extinction has acquired great advance. In the future, the treatment on mental disorders should be more focused on the behavioral therapy based on extinction training.
The paper introduces a new annotation of discourse relations in the Prague Dependency Treebank (PDT), i.e. the annotation of the so called secondary connectives (mainly multiword phrases like the condition is, that is the reason why, to conclude, this means etc.). Firstly, the paper concentrates on theoretical introduction of these expressions (mainly with respect to primary connectives like and, but, or, too etc.) and tries to contribute to the description and definition of discourse connectives in general (both primary and secondary). Secondly, the paper demonstrates possibilities of annotations of secondary connectives in large corpora (like PDT). The paper describes general annotation principles for secondary connectives used in PDT for Czech and compares the results of this annotation with annotation of primary connectives in PDT. In this respect, the main aim of the paper is to introduce a new type of discourse annotation that could be adopted also by other languages.
Compound words are cross-linguistic morphological phenomena that occur in all languages. Compound words are widely accepted to be stored in the lexicon but their constituents need to be accessed during both language learning and production processes. In this study, the use of corpora was investigated for how to differentiate single-stem words from single-word compounds and then how to segment compound words when no phonological information is available. Stems and morphs discovered in manual segmentations of the METU-Sabanci Turkish Treebank and the CHILDES were employed in the compound word recognition task and the results were compared. The METU Turkish Corpus (with about 2 million words) and a webcorpus (with about 490 million of Turkish words) were utilized in the segmentation task. The results emphasize that the lexicon can be morpheme-based; and lexical frequencies are effective heuristics in compound word recognition and segmentation.
Despite extensive research on the neural basis of empathic responses for pain and disgust, there is limited data about the brain regions that underpin affective response to other people's emotional facial expressions. Here, we addressed this question using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging to assess neural responses to emotional faces, combined with online ratings of subjective state. When instructed to rate their own affective response to others' faces, participants recruited anterior insula, dorsal anterior cingulate, inferior frontal gyrus, and amygdala, regions consistently implicated in studies investigating empathy for disgust and pain, as well as emotional saliency. Importantly, responses in anterior insula and amygdala were modulated by trial-by-trial variations in subjective affective responses to the emotional facial stimuli. Furthermore, overall task-elicited activations in these regions were negatively associated with psychopathic personality traits, which are characterized by low affective empathy. Our findings suggest that anterior insula and amygdala play important roles in the generation of affective internal states in response to others' emotional cues and that attenuated function in these regions may underlie reduced empathy in individuals with high levels of psychopathic traits.
In this paper, we introduce an ongoing project for the development of a parallel treebank for Italian, English and French. The treebank is annotated in a dependency format, namely the one designed in the Turin University Treebank (TUT), hence the choice to call such new resource Par(allel)TUT. The project aims at creating a resource which can be useful in particular for translation research. Therefore, beyond constantly enriching the treebank with new and heterogeneous data, so as to build a dynamic and balanced multilingual treebank, the current stage of the project is devoted to the design of a tool for the alignment of data, which takes into account syntactic knowledge as annotated in this kind of resource. The paper focuses in particular on the study of translational divergences and their implications for the development of the alignment tool. The paper provides an overview of the treebank, with its current content and the peculiarities of the annotation format, the description of the classes of translational divergences which could be encountered in the treebank, together with a proposal for their alignment.
Although the distinction between positive and negative facial expressions is assumed to be clear and robust, recent research with intense real-life faces has shown that viewers are unable to reliably differentiate the valence of such expressions (Aviezer, Trope, & Todorov, 2012). Yet, the fact that viewers fail to distinguish these expressions does not in itself testify that the faces are physically identical. In Experiment 1, the muscular activity of victorious and defeated faces was analyzed. Higher numbers of individually coded facial actions--particularly smiling and mouth opening--were more common among winners than losers, indicating an objective difference in facial activity. In Experiment 2, we asked whether supplying participants with valid or invalid information about objective facial activity and valence would alter their ratings. Notwithstanding these manipulations, valence ratings were virtually identical in all groups, and participants failed to differentiate between positive and negative faces. While objective differences between intense positive and negative faces are detectable, human viewers do not utilize these differences in determining valence. These results suggest a surprising dissociation between information present in expressions and information used by perceivers.
Sometime around the year 589, the scholar Lu Deming 陸德明 presented to the Chinese imperial library a new and important work: his Jingdian shiwen 經典釋文, or "Glosses on the Classics". It contained Lu's word-by-word exegeses, glosses and phonetic annotations (in the form of fanqie 反切 phonetic spellings) of fourteen of the greatest classics of ancient China. As the Jingdian shiwen predates all known extant Chinese rhyme dictionaries, it contains a wealth of extremely valuable information for modem scholars and linguists. Unfortunately, the Jingdian shiwen has remained largely understudied, partly because it was composed in an expository style (rather than as a dictionary), and partly because until now the only proofed digital edition of the work has been the version included in the digital Siku quanshu 四庫全書 collectanea, accessible solely by subscription and via its own user interface which presents very limited search options. Our project has thus been to create a plain-text Unicode edition of the entire Jingdian shiwen (all 30 volumes), fully annotated, systematized and designed specifically for inclusion in the online Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese (edoc.uchicago.edu) database so scholars will begin to be able to do targeted searches of its contents and compare Lu Deming's glosses and exegeses with those of other early Chinese dictionaries and reference works.
It is in PropBank's ARGM annotation of clausal adjuncts that sentential semantics meets discourse relation annotation in the Penn Discourse TreeBank. This paper discusses complementarities between the two annotation systems: How PropBank ARGM annotation can be used to seed annotation of additional discourse relations in the PDTB, and how PDTB annotation can be used to refine or enrich PropBank ARGM annotation.
Treebanks are essential resources for both data-driven approaches to natural language processing (NLP) and empirical linguistic researches. Developing these resources is time- and cost-consuming and requires specialized expertise. Therefore, they should be designed to be reused for different purposes. Currently, there are several dependency treebanks for some languages which are annotated in CoNLL format. For some languages, such as Persian, they are the few available linguistic resources. These treebanks are more suitable for the input of data-driven parsers, and querying linguistic data in them is not easy. In recent years, XML has been widely used for formatting treebanks, and there are various tools available for querying and annotating a linguistic croups in this format. In this paper, we present a tool for converting a dependency treebank in CoNLL format to an appropriate XML format. We designed the XML scheme to be particularly suitable for writing linguistic queries in XQuery syntax.
The paper presents the strategies and conversion principles of BulTreeBank into Universal Dependencies annotation scheme. The mappings are discussed from linguistic and technical point of view. The mapping from the original resource to the new one has been done on morphological and syntactic level. The first release of the treebank was issued in May 2015. It contains 125 000 tokens, which cover roughly half of the corpus data.