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18265 papers
The critical role first aid responders, relief workers, and other medical personnel play in crisis and disaster settings cannot be understated. Especially in conflict areas, medical personnel face numerous threats to their security and physical well-being, putting them at risk of developing psychiatric symptoms such as depression, anxiety, and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Because lay medics frequently function as the primary health providers in low-resource conflict situations, their mental health is crucial to the delivery of services to afflicted populations. In this chapter we examine the experiences of community health workers who serve displaced and war-affected populations in Karen State, eastern Burma. The evidence presented is based on the authors' previous qualitative research with this population. Though it is impossible to neatly deconstruct the myriad experiences of suffering, perseverance, and survivorship intrinsic to these medics' lives into the academic frameworks of psychology and psychiatry, an attempt at finding patterns in their narratives that parallel concepts in mental health literature may be helpful in developing evidence-based interventions. Incongruities are implicit in generalizations, and constant awareness of cultural relativism among widely different societal and linguistic norms must be maintained. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)
Recent South Americans have been described as presenting high regional cranial morphological diversity when compared to other regions of the world. This high diversity is in accordance with linguistic and some of the molecular data currently available for the continent, but the origin of this diversity has not been satisfactorily explained yet. Here we explore if this high morphological variation was already present among early groups in South America, in order to refine our knowledge about the timing and origins of the modern morphological diversity. Between-group (Fst estimates) and within-group variances (trace of within-group covariance matrix) of the only two early American population samples available to date (Lagoa Santa and Sabana de Bogotá) were estimated based on linear craniometric measurements and compared to modern human cranial series representing six regions of the world, including the Americas. The results show that early Americans present moderate within-group diversi)
We demonstrate a substantial evidence that the word length can be an essential lexical structural feature for word evolution in written Chinese. The data used in this study are diachronic Chinese short narrative texts with a time span of over 2000-years. We show that the increase of word length is an essential regularity in word evolution. On the one hand, word frequency is found to depend on word length, and their relation is in line with the Power law function y = ax-b. On the other hand, our deeper analyses show that the increase of word length results in the simplification in characters for balance in written Chinese. Moreover, the correspondence between written and spoken Chinese is discussed. We conclude that the disyllabic trend may account for the increase of word length, and its impacts can be explained in "the principle of least effort". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR], Copyright of PLoS ONE is the property of Public Library of Science and its content may not be copied or emailed to )
Rhythms, or patterns in time, play a vital role in both speech and music. Proficiency in a number of rhythm skills has been linked to language ability, suggesting that certain rhythmic processes in music and language rely on overlapping resources. However, a lack of understanding about how rhythm skills relate to each other has impeded progress in understanding how language relies on rhythm processing. In particular, it is unknown whether all rhythm skills are linked together, forming a single broad rhythmic competence, or whether there are multiple dissociable rhythm skills. We hypothesized that beat tapping and rhythm memory/sequencing form two separate clusters of rhythm skills. This hypothesis was tested with a battery of two beat tapping and two rhythm memory tests. Here we show that tapping to a metronome and the ability to adjust to a changing tempo while tapping to a metronome are related skills. The ability to remember rhythms and to drum along to repeating rhythmic sequences)
This study investigated the similarities and differences in perception of Cantonese tones and English stress patterns by Cantonese-English bilingual children, adults, and English monolingual adults. All three groups were asked to discriminate pairs of syllables that minimally differed in either Cantonese tone or in English stress. Bilingual children’s performance on tone perception was comparable to their performance on stress perception. By contrast, bilingual adults’ performance on tone perception was lower than their performance on stress perception, and there was a similar pattern in English monolingual adults. Bilingual adults tended to perform better than English monolingual adults on both the tone and stress perception tests. A significant correlation between tone perception and stress perception performance was found in bilingual children but not in bilingual adults. All three groups showed lower accuracy in the high rising-low rising contrast than any of the other 14 Cantones)
Hedge detection is used to distinguish uncertain information from facts, which is of essential importance in biomedical information extraction. The task of hedge detection is often divided into two subtasks: detecting uncertain cues and their linguistic scope. Hedge scope is a sequence of tokens including the hedge cue in a sentence. Previous hedge scope detection methods usually take all tokens in a sentence as candidate boundaries, which inevitably generate a large number of negatives for classifiers. The imbalanced instances seriously mislead classifiers and result in lower performance. This paper proposes a dependency-based candidate boundary selection method (DCBS), which selects the most likely tokens as candidate boundaries and removes the exceptional tokens which have less potential to improve the performance based on dependency tree. In addition, we employ the composite kernel to integrate lexical and syntactic information and demonstrate the effectiveness of structured synta)
Recent evidence suggests that lexical-semantic activation spread during language production can be dynamically shaped by contextual factors. In this study we investigated whether semantic processing modes can also affect lexical-semantic activation during word production. Specifically, we tested whether the processing of linguistic ambiguities, presented in the form of puns, has an influence on the co-activation of unrelated meanings of homophones in a subsequent language production task. In a picture-word interference paradigm with word distractors that were semantically related or unrelated to the non-depicted meanings of homophones we found facilitation induced by related words only when participants listened to puns before object naming, but not when they heard jokes with unambiguous linguistic stimuli. This finding suggests that a semantic processing mode of ambiguity perception can induce the co-activation of alternative homophone meanings during speech planning. [ABSTRACT FROM )
Signed languages exhibit iconicity (resemblance between form and meaning) across their vocabulary, and many non-Indo-European spoken languages feature sizable classes of iconic words known as ideophones. In comparison, Indo-European languages like English and Spanish are believed to be arbitrary outside of a small number of onomatopoeic words. In three experiments with English and two with Spanish, we asked native speakers to rate the iconicity of ~600 words from the English and Spanish MacArthur-Bates Communicative Developmental Inventories. We found that iconicity in the words of both languages varied in a theoretically meaningful way with lexical category. In both languages, adjectives were rated as more iconic than nouns and function words, and corresponding to typological differences between English and Spanish in verb semantics, English verbs were rated as relatively iconic compared to Spanish verbs. We also found that both languages exhibited a negative relationship between ico)
Using functional magnetic resonance imaging during a primed visual lexical decision task, we investigated the neural and functional mechanisms underlying modulations of semantic word processing through hypnotic suggestions aimed at altering lexical processing of primes. The priming task was to discriminate between target words and pseudowords presented 200 ms after the prime word which was semantically related or unrelated to the target. In a counterbalanced study design, each participant performed the task once at normal wakefulness and once after the administration of hypnotic suggestions to perceive the prime as a meaningless symbol of a foreign language. Neural correlates of priming were defined as significantly lower activations upon semantically related compared to unrelated trials. We found significant suggestive treatment-induced reductions in neural priming, albeit irrespective of the degree of suggestibility. Neural priming was attenuated upon suggestive treatment compared w)
When acquiring language, young children may use acoustic spectro-temporal patterns in speech to derive phonological units in spoken language (e.g., prosodic stress patterns, syllables, phonemes). Children appear to learn acoustic-phonological mappings rapidly, without direct instruction, yet the underlying developmental mechanisms remain unclear. Across different languages, a relationship between amplitude envelope sensitivity and phonological development has been found, suggesting that children may make use of amplitude modulation (AM) patterns within the envelope to develop a phonological system. Here we present the Spectral Amplitude Modulation Phase Hierarchy (S-AMPH) model, a set of algorithms for deriving the dominant AM patterns in child-directed speech (CDS). Using Principal Components Analysis, we show that rhythmic CDS contains an AM hierarchy comprising 3 core modulation timescales. These timescales correspond to key phonological units: prosodic stress (Stress AM, ~2 Hz), s)
In a cancellation task, a participant is required to search for and cross out (“cancel”) targets, which are usually embedded among distractor stimuli. The number of cancelled targets and their location can be used to diagnose the neglect syndrome after stroke. In addition, the organization of search provides a potentially useful way to measure executive control over multitarget search. Although many useful cancellation measures have been introduced, most fail to make their way into research studies and clinical practice due to the practical difficulty of acquiring such parameters from traditional pen-and-paper measures. Here we present new, open-source software that is freely available to all. It allows researchers and clinicians to flexibly administer computerized cancellation tasks using stimuli of their choice, and to directly analyze the data in a convenient manner. The automated analysis suite provides output that includes almost all of the currently existing measures, as well as several new ones introduced here. All tasks can be performed using either a computer mouse or a touchscreen as an input device, and an online version of the task runtime is available for tablet devices. A summary of the results is produced in a single A4-sized PDF document, including high quality data visualizations. For research purposes, batch analysis of large datasets is possible. In sum, CancellationTools allows users to employ a flexible, computerized cancellation task, which provides extensive benefits and ease of use.
We report on a study that aimed to improve an existing tone label prediction algorithm for Sesotho, an official language of South Africa. Tone is an important prosodic feature of Sesotho, since speakers use tone to distinguish meaning. In order to implement tone in a Text-to-Speech system for Sesotho, a tone modeling algorithm must receive as input the tone labels of the syllables of each word. Then it can predict the appropriate intonation of the word. Since Sesotho does not mark tone labels in orthography, the labels have to be predicted according to the tonal rules of the language. The existing tone label prediction algorithm has two drawbacks, namely it implements three tonal rules only and is restricted to the clitic phrase domain. In our study, we developed an algorithm that implements four additional tonal rules and addresses all parts of speech. The results show that the latter algorithm significantly improves the existing one by increasing the number of matched tone labels.
The self-determination of peoples is a fundamental legitimating principle of the international system; it justifies the system’s very existence. Through a vast diachronic corpus and pertinent data sets, this article nevertheless reveals a puzzling decline in the public discourse on, and practice of, self-determination over the last 50 years. I identify and assess four structural explanations for this decline: “lexical change” (replacing self-determination with alternative terms); “silent hegemony” (taking the norm for granted); “reactive rhetoric” (echoing conflicts and new state formation post hoc); and “mission accomplished” (rectifying the incongruence between national boundaries and state borders). Complementing these structural causes with agential reasons, I further suggest that powerful state actors and persuasive academics have sought to “tame” self-determination as both principle and practice, retaining the term but altering its meaning from a source of threat into a resource for containing it. Self-determination, however, has not been eliminated, and taming it may yet prove a pyrrhic victory.
Explaining the diversity of languages across the world is one of the central aims of typological, historical, and evolutionary linguistics. We consider the effect of language contact-the number of non-native speakers a language has-on the way languages change and evolve. By analysing hundreds of languages within and across language families, regions, and text types, we show that languages with greater levels of contact typically employ fewer word forms to encode the same information content (a property we refer to as lexical diversity). Based on three types of statistical analyses, we demonstrate that this variance can in part be explained by the impact of non-native speakers on information encoding strategies. Finally, we argue that languages are information encoding systems shaped by the varying needs of their speakers. Language evolution and change should be modeled as the co-evolution of multiple intertwined adaptive systems: On one hand, the structure of human societies and human)
The verbal periphrasis estar+gerundio (EG) conjugated in simple present (estoy viajando) is the aspectual expression of progression in Spanish of an event that develops during the moment that is spoken (speech time S). Within Reichenbach's system of temporal relations, there is a coincidence relation with expression in the present tense between S and its point of reference R, and the relation is represented as S,R. The system identifies another time interval of the event E. With EG of progressive aspect the temporal relation is of coincidence between S and E, and it is represented as S,R,E. EG has also a reading of prospective aspect that refers to events that have not yet occurred restricted to events happening at an immediate future (estoy viajando dentro de cinco minutos). The relation of coincidence S,R holds due the short temporal distance between the event E and the speech time S. In this kind of sentences, the temporal adjunct plays an important role as an argument that indicates the event time E. The relation is represented as S,R_E. This study proposes an additional reading of EG in speakers of the educated norm of Lima's variety in Peruvian Spanish (NEL). It is a modal use. When the subject is the one who performs the action (participant oriented) the modal is called volitional of deliberative intention with a reading similar to " pensar+infinitivo". With this kind of modal reading the periphrasis tense is no longer restricted by the temporal relation S,R and it allows a reading of non-immediate future events (estoy viajando mañana) with the temporal relation of posteriority S_R. I propose that EG with a modal reading allows the temporal relation S_R, E. The literature does not provide much information about the use of EG with a reading of non-immediate future in the NEL variety (Caravedo, 1992; Squartini, 1998). The use I propose as modal has been analyzed by the literature under the time and aspect perspective which considers its use as anomalous or a use influenced by the English futurate present progressive (I am travelling tomorrow). The theoretic frame of this study includes the work done by Olbertz (1998), which was used to identify the uses of EG within the Spanish periphrasis classification; by Cinque (2006), to locate EG expressions within the hierarchy of restructuring verbs; and by Giorgi and Pianesi (1997) whose proposals on the expressions of present perfect were useful to apply them to the uses of EG prospective and modal. Within those proposals, the one on the relation between semantics and morphosyntax is applied in the representation of EG. Through the semantic analysis, the temporal relations between S and E are explained, and the morphosyntactic one shows the change occurring in the auxiliary verb --in Spanish it occurs in the agreement head AGR--, that produces a prospective reading ASPprosp or a modal one MOD in their respective representation. Also, the importance of the temporal adjunct is taken into account in the representation. With prospective and modal readings, the adjunct is an argument (T-ARG) which contains a temporal feature (T-DEF) that has to check with ASPprosp or MOD of the auxiliary verb depending on the reading. With the first reading the temporal relation in ASPprosp is restricted to an imminent future S,R, so the expression holds if T-ARG expresses an event time close to S. The feature T-DEF checks in ASPprosp and if the meaning maintains the coincidental relation with S, then the expression is grammatical. With the second reading, T-DEF checks against a modal head MOD, and with modals, there are no temporal restrictions. Therefore, the modal reading of EG allows futurity readings with the temporal relation S_R,E. In regard to the lexical aspect, EG modal restricts its use to dynamic verbs and rejects stative verbs. This study also suggests that there is an opposition between EG modal and the modal morphological future. It has been discussed in the Latin-America literature (Sedano, 2006; Escobar, 2009) that the latter has been losing its reading of futurity for a modal one marking doubt or conjecture. EG modal is an expression of assertion. This study conducted an experimental test in order to find out if the contrast I propose exists between these two modal forms in speakers of the NEL. The purpose of the test was to establish an interaction between two opposing conditions of two variables. Even though this study did not obtain the interaction results that would demonstrate the proposed contrast, the experiment suggests that the speaker of the NEL variety continues to use the morphological future as assertive expressions. The experiment allowed to make the observation that the use of EG is accepted by the NEL variety as a modal expression which is what it is proposed in this study. | The verbal periphrasis estar+gerundio (EG) conjugated in simple present (estoy viajando) is the aspectual expression of progression in Spanish of an event that develops during the moment that is spoken (speech time S). Within Reichenbach's system of temporal relations, there is a coincidence relation with expression in the present tense between S and its point of reference R, and the relation is represented as S,R. The system identifies another time interval of the event E. With EG of progressive aspect the temporal relation is of coincidence between S and E, and it is represented as S,R,E. EG has also a reading of prospective aspect that refers to events that have not yet occurred restricted to events happening at an immediate future (estoy viajando dentro de cinco minutos). The relation of coincidence S,R holds due the short temporal distance between the event E and the speech time S. In this kind of sentences, the temporal adjunct plays an important role as an argument that indicates the event time E. The relation is represented as S,R_E. This study proposes an additional reading of EG in speakers of the educated norm of Lima's variety in Peruvian Spanish (NEL). It is a modal use. When the subject is the one who performs the action (participant oriented) the modal is called volitional of deliberative intention with a reading similar to " pensar+infinitivo". With this kind of modal reading the periphrasis tense is no longer restricted by the temporal relation S,R and it allows a reading of non-immediate future events (estoy viajando mañana) with the temporal relation of posteriority S_R. I propose that EG with a modal reading allows the temporal relation S_R, E. The literature does not provide much information about the use of EG with a reading of non-immediate future in the NEL variety (Caravedo, 1992; Squartini, 1998). The use I propose as modal has been analyzed by the literature under the time and aspect perspective which considers its use as anomalous or a use influenced by the English futurate present progressive (I am travelling tomorrow). The theoretic frame of this study includes the work done by Olbertz (1998), which was used to identify the uses of EG within the Spanish periphrasis classification; by Cinque (2006), to locate EG expressions within the hierarchy of restructuring verbs; and by Giorgi and Pianesi (1997) whose proposals on the expressions of present perfect were useful to apply them to the uses of EG prospective and modal. Within those proposals, the one on the relation between semantics and morphosyntax is applied in the representation of EG. Through the semantic analysis, the temporal relations between S and E are explained, and the morphosyntactic one shows the change occurring in the auxiliary verb --in Spanish it occurs in the agreement head AGR--, that produces a prospective reading ASPprosp or a modal one MOD in their respective representation. Also, the importance of the temporal adjunct is taken into account in the representation. With prospective and modal readings, the adjunct is an argument (T-ARG) which contains a temporal feature (T-DEF) that has to check with ASPprosp or MOD of the auxiliary verb depending on the reading. With the first reading the temporal relation in ASPprosp is restricted to an imminent future S,R, so the expression holds if T-ARG expresses an event time close to S. The feature T-DEF checks in ASPprosp and if the meaning maintains the coincidental relation with S, then the expression is grammatical. With the second reading, T-DEF checks against a modal head MOD, and with modals, there are no temporal restrictions. Therefore, the modal reading of EG allows futurity readings with the temporal relation S_R,E. In regard to the lexical aspect, EG modal restricts its use to dynamic verbs and rejects stative verbs. This study also suggests that there is an opposition between EG modal and the modal morphological future. It has been discussed in the Latin-America literature (Sedano, 2006; Escobar, 2009) that the latter has been losing its reading of futurity for a modal one marking doubt or conjecture. EG modal is an expression of assertion. This study conducted an experimental test in order to find out if the contrast I propose exists between these two modal forms in speakers of the NEL. The purpose of the test was to establish an interaction between two opposing conditions of two variables. Even though this study did not obtain the interaction results that would demonstrate the proposed contrast, the experiment suggests that the speaker of the NEL variety continues to use the morphological future as assertive expressions. The experiment allowed to make the observation that the use of EG is accepted by the NEL variety as a modal expression which is what it is proposed in this study. | 141 pages
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 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.
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.
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.
We study non-deterministic oracles for training non-projective beam search parsers with swap transitions. We map out the spurious ambiguities of the transition system and present two non-deterministic oracles as well as a static oracle that minimizes the number of swaps. An evaluation on 10 treebanks reveals that the difference between static and non-deterministic oracles is generally insignificant for beam search parsers but that non-deterministic oracles can improve the accuracy of greedy parsers that use swap transitions.
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.
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.
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.
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™.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.