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18265 papers
Reference Studies who have been using the data (in any form) are required to include the following reference: @inproceedings{Liu:2014:AED:2642937.2642969, author = {Liu, Shuang and Sun, Jun and Liu, Yang and Zhang, Yue and Wadhwa, Bimlesh and Dong, Jin Song and Wang, Xinyu}, title = {Automatic Early Defects Detection in Use Case Documents}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 29th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Automated Software Engineering}, series = {ASE '14}, year = {2014}, isbn = {978-1-4503-3013-8}, location = {Vasteras, Sweden}, pages = {785--790}, numpages = {6}, url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2642937.2642969}, doi = {10.1145/2642937.2642969}, acmid = {2642969}, publisher = {ACM}, address = {New York, NY, USA}, keywords = {natural language processing, use cases}, } About the Data Overview of Data It has been reported that “More than 60% of the errors in a software product are committed during the design and less than 40% during coding.”[1] and “Finding and fixing a software problem after delivery is often 100 times more expensive than finding and fixing it during the requirements and design phase” [2]. So finding defects in an early stage of software development is of great importance. Use cases are widely used in Model-Driven Development to capture user requirements. Since the majority part of a use case document is written in natural language, it is thus highly desirable to rely on advanced natural language processing techniques to automatic the procedure of defects detection in use case documents. Natural Language Parser Zpar is a statistical muti-language parser. It has the state-of-the-art speed and accuracy for both Chinese and English on standard Penn Treebank data. Zpar provides word segmentation, part-of-speech tagging, dependency parsing and phrase structure parsing functionalities. Use Case Defect Finder (UCDF) We developed a tool (UCDF) to automatically analysis use case documents and find defects. The source code is available here. Input Use Case Documents We tested UCDF on two use case documents (for real systems). One is a stock trading system and the other is a personalized health informatics system for a reference implementation for IEEEP2407-compliant system. The stock trading system is in real use, thus the specifications of the system are confidential. We release the use case document for the personalized health informatics system, the automated guided vehicle system, the emergency monitoring system and the online shopping system. Paper Abstract Use cases, as the primary techniques in the user requirement analysis, have been widely adopted in the requirement engineering practice. As developed early, use cases also serve as the basis for function requirement development, system design and testing. Errors in the use cases could potentially lead to problems in the system design or implementation. It is thus highly desirable to detect errors in use cases. Automatically analyzing use case documents is challenging primarily because they are written in natural languages. In this work, we aim to achieve automatic defect detection in use case documents by leveraging on advanced parsing techniques. In our approach, we first parse the use case document using dependency parsing techniques. The parsing results of each use case are further processed to form an activity diagram. Lastly, we perform defect detection on the activity diagrams. To evaluate our approach, we have conducted experiments on 200+ real-world as well as academic use cases. The results show the effectiveness of our method.
Infinitivus pro participio (IPP) or Ersatzinfinitiv is a linguistic phenomenon occurring in a subset of the West Germanic languages, such as Dutch, German, and Afrikaans. IPP refers to constructions with a perfect auxiliary, in which an infinitive appears instead of the expected past participle. In Afrikaans, one expects the temporal auxiliary for the perfect tense to select a past participle, cf. gebly in example (1a). However, when a verb occurring in the perfect tense selects another verb, it commonly occurs as an infinitive, cf. bly in example (1b), instead of the expected past participle, as illustrated in example (1c). (1a) Hy het stil gebly. (1b) Hy het bly praat. (1c) Hy het gebly praat. Ponelis (1979), De Vos (2001), and Zwart (2007) report that IPP appears optionally in Afrikaans. This contrasts with Dutch and German, as in those languages IPP is obligatory for certain verbs. Donaldson (1993) mentions however that IPP is triggered in most cases, such as in example (1b). Constructions with a past participle such as (1c) do occur, but Donaldson considers them non-standard Afrikaans. Apart from double infinitive constructions, there is a second construction in which IPP can be triggered. Afrikaans has a serialization pattern using the conjunction en (and) in order to express the continuous or progressive aspect of the verb, as in example (2a). Such constructions also exist in Danish (e.g. Du havde måttet sidde og lære dine lektier ‘You should have done your homework’) and English (e.g. He sits and reads), but not in Dutch nor German. If this construction is put in the perfect tense, the first main verb has optional ge-marking, so it optionally triggers IPP, while the second main verb always occurs in the infinitive, as shown for the verb staan in examples (2b-c). Both forms are considered standard Afrikaans by Ponelis (1979), Donaldson (1993), and Zwart (2007). (2a) Ons staan stil en luister. (2b) Ons het stil staan en luister. (2c) Ons het stil gestaan en luister. Compared to well-resourced languages such as English and Dutch, NLP tools for linguistic analysis in Afrikaans are still not abundant. In order to facilitate corpus-based linguistic research for Afrikaans, we are creating a treebank based on the Taalkommissie corpus. We adapted a tokenizer and a shallow parser, while using the TnT tagger to do part-ofspeech annotation. In Augustinus and Dirix (2013), we used these tools to investigate the occurrence of IPP in Afrikaans. The case study on IPP triggers in Afrikaans shows that a corpus-based study can shed a new light on the descriptive research of a linguistic phenomenon. Based on the literature, the hypothesis is that, in contrast to Dutch and German, IPP occurs optionally in Afrikaans. The corpus results, however, reveal that infinitive-selecting verbs in double infinitive constructions appear as IPP in almost 99% of the constructions under investigation. The results of the progressive constructions are more consistent with the current literature, since the IPP phenomenon optionally occurs in such constructions (i.e. in ca. 50% of the cases). Moreover, we can conclude that verbs that occur as IPP verbs in the double infinitive construction, do not occur as IPPs in the progressive construction and vice versa. Building on a corpus investigation of Dutch and German IPP constructions (Augustinus & Van Eynde, in press), we will include the Afrikaans data in a cross-linguistic typology of IPP verbs, in order to get a more accurate description of the differences and similarities regarding IPP across languages.
In assessing L2 lexical learning, especially initial learning, researchers always face the problem of whether partial word learning should be counted. Existing studies have either counted partial word learning (i.e. counted both partial and complete word learning) or have only counted complete word learning. However, it is not clear whether counting partial word learning makes a difference in capturing task-based and intra-learner lexical learning gain. Few studies have investigated this potential difference and even fewer if both productive and receptive lexical learning are considered. The present study employed differently fine-grained word rating methods to assess three Chinese EFL learner groups’ performances on four vocabulary posttests after receiving three treatment tasks: a written output task, an oral output task, and a reading task. Data analyses revealed that the use of differently fine-grained scoring methods did not necessarily affect learners’ cross-task lexical learning effects significantly, but it did make a significant difference in measuring individual learners’ lexical learning gain. The findings are discussed with reference to whether and how a less or more fine-grained scoring method should be adopted in rating lexical learning.
This paper analyzes the sequences of high vocoids (/ji, ju, wi, wu/) from a diachronic perspective, focusing on their distribution. /ju/-related phenomena have been dealt with, producing various suggestions or accounts about its underlying status, optional /j/-deletion, the position of /j/ in a syllable, co-occurrence restrictions between /j/ and its neighboring sounds, different behaviors of /ju/ and /wi/, etc. This paper does not tackle these issues directly, but instead investigates the distribution of high vocoid sequences (/ji, ju, wi, wu/) which appear in the CELEX Lexical Database, and examines how they have changed through time. The results reveal that /ju/ is very peculiar in that almost all the words with /ju/ have been added to English by continuous influx of French or Latin words, in most of which /ju/ is represented by the single letter, not by two letters. In contrast, the majority of /wi/ words are native words, and /wi/ is represented by two letters. /wu/ and /ji/ words are very few, but almost all of them are native words. It is concluded, thus, that the peculiarity of the sequence /ju/ might be related to the idiosyncratic behavior of /ju/ frequently observed in the issues mentioned above.
We propose a model of Tibetan syntactic parsing which is based on Tibetan syl lables instead of Tibetan words, change Tibetan syntactic Treebank use algorith m of labeling.
We describe a well-performed semantic role labeling system that further extracts concepts (smaller semantic expressions) from unstructured natural language sentences language independently. A dual-layer semantic role labeling (SRL) system is built using Chinese Treebank and Propbank data. Contextual information is incorporated while labeling the predicate arguments to achieve better performance. Experimental results show that the proposed approach is superior to CoNLL 2009 best systems and comparable to the state of the art with the advantage that it requires no feature engineering process. Concepts are further extracted according to templates formulated by the labeled semantic roles to serve as features in other NLP tasks to provide semantically related cues and potentially help in related research problems. We also show that it is easy to generate a different language version of this system by actually building an English system which performs satisfactory.
The article introduces two internet sources designated to the study of Older Czech language (13th to 18th centuries); both have been designed and run by The Department of Language Development at The Institute of the Czech Language at the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. The first source, Vokabulář webový [Web Vocabulary] (http://vokabular.ujc.cas.cz), makes texts, images and audio materials available to the study of Older Czech language. The accessible materials are, primarily, both modern and historical dictionaries, amongst which the most salient is the, gradually growing, Elektronický slovník staré češtiny [Electronic Old-Czech Vocabulary] that treats Old-Czech lexicon from the dawn of Czech language to the end of the 15th century. Furthermore, Vokabulář includes electronic editions of the works originating in the period from the 13th century to the beginning of the 19th century, presented both as continuous texts and in the corpus version; digitalized copies of Older-Czech grammar books; basic scientific literature; audiobooks of Older-Czech texts; and software tools utilized for the work with historical texts. The second source is Lexikální databáze hu-manistické a barokní češtiny [Lexical Database of Humanistic and Baroque Czech] (http://madla.ujc.cas.cz). It records the Czech vocabulary of the 16th to 18th centuries based on the excerption of the authentic contemporary texts (both old prints and manuscripts): Lexical database illustrates the Czech vocabulary with direct quotations, including stating the source. Thus, Lexical Database partly substitutes the missing Czech vocabulary of the mentioned period.
In education literature, there is a call for the development of pedagogical activities about socio-scientific issues, both for their affordance with the epistemic values of a renewed vision of science teaching (e. g. Driver, Newton, Osborne, 2000, Sadler & Zeidler, 2005), and for concerns of citizenship education (e. g. Legardez & Simonneaux, 2006). To develop high quality reasoning on such topics, fundamental knowledge on key scientific concepts together with socio-ethical beliefs, values and interests structuring the controversy must be taken into account (Oulton, Dillon, Grace, 2004, Albe, 2009). Contrary to mainstream traditional educational routines, the students are not expected to give a right or wrong answer and are required to use and confront various information sources (daily experience, the media, school knowledge, moral principles, cultural common sense, etc). From a corpus of videotaped scientific cafe-type debates about drinking water management, collected in schools in Mexico, the US and France, I analyzed the typical argumentative resources used by the students in such setting (emotions, norms and knowledge). In this presentation, the focus is on the pieces of knowledge that are co-constructed all along the activity, led by 15-17 year-old student moderators for 12-14 year-old student attendees. The emergence and evolution of two different micro-units of knowledge content (1. the use of water for the production of other goods and 2. the distinction between the cost and the price) were followed during the distinct steps of the cafe (alternation of quiz on basic knowledge, group discussion, and group and class debates on socio-scientific issues). In order to have a global temporal picture of the genesis of these pieces of knowledge, and a better understanding of moderators’ role in the process, these micro-units of content were also tracked on the video of the moderators’ training, which took place prior to the cafe. With the help of video annotation tools (Transana and ELAN), each occurrence of each micro-unit of knowledge was precisely characterized on a multimodal perspective. The coding scheme includes key lexical and structural elements, main gesture features, and the use of material resources in the pedagogical environment. The analytical tools were developed on the basis of previous literature on gesture analysis (e. g. Colletta, Ramona, Kunene, Venouil, Kaufmann, Simon, 2009, Cosnier, 2004, Kendon, 2004, McNeill, 1992, 2000) and empirical observation of the data. It serves as a basis to compare the multimodal trajectory of each micro-unit of knowledge, in different communicative contexts (quiz elucidation or debate on socio-scientific issues, linguistic and cultural environment, moderating style, type of knowledge involved). This contrastive stance leads to a discussion on whether some features of the multimodal scenario of emergence of a piece of knowledge can be considered determinant to fosters its elaboration and later reinvestment at different social levels (individual, small group, whole classroom).
Graph-based dependency parsing algorithms commonly employ features up to third order in an attempt to capture richer syntactic relations. However, each level and each feature combination must be defined manually. Besides that, input features are usually represented as huge, sparse binary vectors, offering limited generalization. In this work, \nwe present a deep architecture for dependency parsing based on a convolutional neural network. It can examine the whole sentence structure before scoring each head/modifier \ncandidate pair, and uses dense embeddings as input. Our model is still under ongoing work, achieving 91.6% unlabeled attachment score in the Penn Treebank.
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Playing certain types of video games for a long time can improve a wide range of mental processes, from visual acuity to cognitive control. Frequent gamers have also displayed generalized improvements in perceptual learning. In the Texture Discrimination Task (TDT), a widely used perceptual learning paradigm, participants report the orientation of a target embedded in a field of lines and demonstrate robust over-night improvement. However, changing the orientation of the background lines midway through TDT training interferes with overnight improvements in overall performance on TDT. Interestingly, prior research has suggested that this effect will not occur if a one-hour break is allowed in between the changes. These results have suggested that after training is over, it may take some time for learning to become stabilized and resilient against interference. Here, we tested whether frequent gamers have faster stabilization of perceptual learning compared to non-gamers and examined th)
BACKGROUND: Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is associated with marked anxiety, which triggers repetitive behaviours or mental rituals. The persistence of pathological anxiety and maladaptive strategies to reduce anxiety point to altered emotion regulation. The late positive potential (LPP) is an event-related brain potential (ERP) that reflects sustained attention to emotional stimuli and is sensitive to emotion-regulation instructions. We hypothesized that patients with OCD show altered electrocortical responses during reappraisal of stimuli triggering their symptoms. METHOD: To test our hypothesis, ERPs to disorder-relevant, generally aversive and neutral pictures were recorded while participants were instructed to either maintain or reduce emotional responding using cognitive distraction or cognitive reappraisal. RESULTS: Relative to healthy controls, patients with OCD showed enhanced LPPs in response to disorder-relevant pictures, indicating their prioritized processing. While both distraction and reappraisal successfully reduced the LPP in healthy controls, patients with OCD failed to show corresponding LPP modulation during cognitive reappraisal despite successfully reduced subjective arousal ratings. CONCLUSIONS: The results point to sustained attention towards emotional stimuli during cognitive reappraisal in OCD and suggest that abnormal emotion regulation should be integrated in models of OCD.
To study emotional reactions to music, it is important to consider the temporal dynamics of both affective responses and underlying brain activity. Here, we investigated emotions induced by music using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with a data-driven approach based on intersubject correlations (ISC). This method allowed us to identify moments in the music that produced similar brain activity (i.e. synchrony) among listeners under relatively natural listening conditions. Continuous ratings of subjective pleasantness and arousal elicited by the music were also obtained for the music outside of the scanner. Our results reveal synchronous activations in left amygdala, left insula and right caudate nucleus that were associated with higher arousal, whereas positive valence ratings correlated with decreases in amygdala and caudate activity. Additional analyses showed that synchronous amygdala responses were driven by energy-related features in the music such as root mean square and dissonance, while synchrony in insula was additionally sensitive to acoustic event density. Intersubject synchrony also occurred in the left nucleus accumbens, a region critically implicated in reward processing. Our study demonstrates the feasibility and usefulness of an approach based on ISC to explore the temporal dynamics of music perception and emotion in naturalistic conditions.
Our knowledge of objects reflects the statistics of the visual environment. From our experiences in the world, we store information about categories of objects and the features that define them. One important statistical property of objects is the co-occurrence of their constituent features. For example, the round shape of an apple co-occurs frequently with the color red, but not the color blue. Here we examine the neural mechanisms that encode such feature co-occurrence statistics at the interface of perception and memory. In an fMRI experiment, subjects viewed images of colored objects while performing an unrelated scrambled-object detection task. The stimuli included exemplars from three different categories: apples, leaves, and roses. To create stimuli that sampled a range of co-occurrence statistics, each exemplar image had its color systematically manipulated to be red, pink, yellow, green, or blue (Fig.1A). We quantified co-occurrence frequencies of color-object combinations (e.g., “yellow apple”) in a large lexical corpus. A separate norming study demonstrated that this metric was strongly correlated with subjective ratings of color-object typicality. Importantly, the co-occurrence of object and color information is independent of the frequencies of each feature alone. We tested the hypothesis that feature co-occurrence information is encoded in semantic memory regions and automatically retrieved during object perception. Using representational similarity analysis, we identified regions where response patterns were similar for category exemplars with similar co-occurrence statistics (Fig.2B). We expected that the angular gyrus would encode combinatorial information given its proposed role in semantic integration. Indeed, we found that this region and the anterior fusiform cortex encode high-level feature co-occurrence statistics, while early visual cortex, lateral-occipital complex, and inferior-temporal cortex did not. These results suggest that regions at the interface of vision and semantic memory encode combinatorial information that underlies real-world knowledge of objects and is independent of coding for individual features. Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2015
Resumen: El discurso femenino se ha asociado tradicionalmente a la cortesía y la indirección, dos rasgos que chocan frontalmente con la norma lingüística imperante en discursos agonales como el parlamentario. Para constatar la veracidad de esta afirmación, el presente artículo aborda el análisis pragmalingüístico de uno de los recursos que se encuentran al servicio de la modificación de la fuerza ilocutiva de la aserción: aquellos verbos realizativos que introducen la opinión del hablante indicando el grado de responsabilidad que este asume ante el dictum. Este estudio pretende, pues, identificar los verbos de opinión empleados en cuarenta preguntas orales y veinte interpelaciones correspondientes a la VIII Legislatura del Parlamento andaluz, examinar su funcionamiento y características formales y, en última instancia, analizar cuantitativamente su empleo según las variables sexo y rol desempeñado._________________________________________________________________________________________________________Abstract: Female speech has been traditionally associated with politeness and indirection, two characteristics that clash with the prevailing linguistic norm in agonistic discourses such as the parliamentarian ones. The main aim of thisarticle is to test the veracity of this statement. Thus, we will undertake the pragmalinguistic analysis of a specific element that modifies the illocutionary force of assertion: performative verbs that introduce speaker’s opinions, showing the level of responsibility assumed. This article will identify such verbs as used in forty question-time occurrences and twenty interpellations during the VIII Term of the Andalusian Parliament, to examine their behaviour and formal characteristics, and to quantitatively analyze their use according to two variables: sex and role played.
Abstract This study explores the extent to which first language (L1) versus second language (L2) use and attachments to native versus majority language and culture influence the proficiency in the L2 Dutch among the Turkish-Dutch bilinguals. The community under investigation is of particular significance because it represents the largest non-Western ethnic group in the Netherlands and it has often been discussed in the context of the group members’ ethnic and linguistic attachments as opposed to their perceived unwillingness to adopt the cultural norms of the Dutch society. What makes this immigration setting interesting is that the shift from tolerance to startling levels of restrictiveness in policies of cultural and linguistic integration has nowhere been as fast as in the Netherlands. Data are collected from the first generation Turkish immigrants (n = 45) who migrated to the Netherlands after the age of 15 and lived there for 10 years or longer and native Dutch speakers (n = 39) via an elicited speech task, a lexical naming/recognition task and a sociolinguistic background questionnaire. The first set of analyses reveals several links between the individual variables (i.e., L1 use in the family and with friends, L2 use at work, level of education, length of residence and cultural preference) and different aspects of L2 proficiency. However, the effect sizes of these correlations are weak to moderate. The second set of analyses applies a discriminant analysis where proficiency in the L2 has been established as one integrated score. In this analysis, only preferred language emerges as the best predictor of language development.
The PROIEL Treebank is a dependency treebank with morphosyntactic and information-structure annotation. It includes texts in several ancient Indo-European languages and is freely available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License.
The translation of corporate publicity material,(TCPM for short), as a pragmatic text, calls for guidance of relevant theo-ry since someword-for-wordtranslation is far from adequate to achieve its purpose. International exchange and communicationin the Southern areas of Jiangsu Province are developing fast and of important value. Therefore, the present study attempts to con-duct the research on in the lights ofFunctional EquivalenceandSkopos Theory. In the proposed translation strategy, the studygives due attention to the TCPM's unique aspect, which has both vocative and informative function. Thus the translator shall taketarget language and its culture norms into consideration so as to make the translated text readable. To achieve the desired effect ofthe translated text, the translator shall free themselves from theFormal Equivalenceand rigid translation, and take efforts toadapt to target reader's cultural background and language norm, thus improving translsted texts at lexical, syntactic, and textuallevels.
At every level of the language (phonetic, lexical, morphological and syntactic), Mateiu Caragiale's prose and poetry display features of the standard norm of the epoch (often dialectal) as well as to the dominant norm of the epoch, the author oscillating permanently between the two of them. To adequately interpret the language peculiarities of the author's works, one needs to distinguish clearly between the epoch norm (the literary norm of a certain period, subsequently turned into archaism) and the dominant norm.
Abstract The Article aims to describe that social criticism not only can be yelled through protest, but also through the lyrics of the song. Social criticism lyrics of the song, in general, addressed to the government, state officials, and Indonesia politicians. The issues discussed in this paper is the social behavior of state officials and politicians in the Orde Baru and Era Reformasi, as well as the vocabulary used by the composer to encode the events that occurred at that time. The data of this paper were collected through listening methods using downloading technique and recording. The data were analyzed with the theory of dynamic model of meaning (Kecskes, 2007), which states that a person’s knowledge of the world may be encoded in the lexical item as a mixture of general knowledge associated with the provision concept, the wordspecific semantic properties (lexicalization knowledge of the world), and culture-specific conceptual properties. It is something new because during the analysis of social criticism lyrics of the song are dominated by semiotic theory and discourse theory. This paper found four types of behavior of state officials encoded in the lyrics of social criticism, namely (a) the behavior of enriching themselves by corruption the country money, (b) behavior of justifying a variety of ways to get the desired positions, (c) the behavior of being dared to violate religious norms to get the treasure, and (d) the behavior of being happy to commit fornication. Keywords: social critics, behavior, encode, song lyrics, state officials Abstrak Tulisan ini bertujuan untuk mendeskripsikan bahwa kritik sosial tidak hanya dapat dilakukan melalui demonstrasi, tetapi dapat juga dilakukan melalui lirik lagu. Lirik lagu kritik sosial, pada umumnya, ditujukan kepada pemerintah, pejabat negara, dan para politisi Indonesia. Masalah yang dibahas dalam tulisan ini adalah perilaku sosial para pejabat negara dan para politisi pada masa Orde Baru dan Era Reformasi, serta kosakata yang digunakan oleh pencipta lagu untuk menyandikan berbagai peristiwa yang terjadi pada masa itu. Data tulisan ini dikumpulkan melalui metode simak dengan teknik pengunduhan dan teknik pencatatan. Data dianalisis dengan Teori Model Makna Dinamis. Hal itu merupakan sesuatu yang baru karena selama ini analisis lirik lagu kritik sosial didominasi oleh teori semiotik dan teori wacana. Temuan tulisan yaitu empat jenis perilaku pejabat negara yang tersandi dalam lirik lagu kritik sosial, yakni (a) perilaku memperkaya diri dengan cara mengorupsi uang negara, (b) perilaku menghalalkan berbagai cara untuk mendapatkan jabatan yang dinginkan,(c) perilaku berani melanggar norma agama demi mendapatkan harta, dan (d) senang melakukan perbuatan zina. Kata kunci: kritik sosial, perilaku, tersandi, lirik lagu, pejabat negara
This paper proposes a novel approach to sentiment analysis that leverages work in sociology on symbolic interactionism. The proposed approach uses Affect Control Theory (ACT) to analyze readers' sentiment towards factual (objective) content and towards its entities (subject and object). ACT is a theory of affective reasoning that uses empirically derived equations to predict the sentiments and emotions that arise from events. This theory relies on several large lexicons of words with affective ratings in a three-dimensional space of evaluation, potency, and activity (EPA). The equations and lexicons of ACT were evaluated on a newly collected news-headlines corpus. ACT lexicon was expanded using a label propagation algorithm, resulting in 86,604 new words. The predicted emotions for each news headline was then computed using the augmented lexicon and ACT equations. The results had a precision of 82%, 79%, and 68% towards the event, the subject, and object, respectively. These results are significantly higher than those of standard sentiment analysis techniques.
The term âpoetic grammarâ refers to the formal patterns that distinguish poetic registers from other modes of speech: for example, patterns in meter and rhyme schemes. For many poetic traditions, function is also a distinguishing feature: epic poetry is a vehicle for heroic lore, for instance, and liturgical hymns convey entreaties to gods. Thus, poetic genres are characterized in terms of patterns in sound or typical topics; connections between form and function are most often left unexplored. My dissertation examines relationships between traditional formal âstructuring devicesâ and the quite heterogeneous functions of a selection of hymns from the Rig Veda, the most ancient of Indic liturgical texts and one of considerable self-conscious poetic intricacy. Working in the traditions of interdisciplinary poetics pioneered by such figures as Roman Jakobson and Mikhail Bakhtin, and building on the insights of historical linguistics, I will explore how the phonological, grammatical and lexical patterns that comprise formal structuring devices are used to shape a discourse, and to further specific rhetorical goals of the Rigvedic poet Vasiá¹£á¹ha, among other speakers.Most Rigvedic hymns are embedded within ritual contexts; the poets are the primary speakers, and gods, patrons and ritual officiants the usual addressees. In addition, dialogue hymns present conversations between divine and human consorts and spouses. Structuring devices connect passages that affirm the norms of poetic grammar with variations that counter or distort them, creating a double-voiced discourse (i.e. âheteroglossiaâ) that helps certain speakers, whose lack of divinity, lower class, or disfavored gender puts them at a disadvantage with their interlocutor, gain control of ritual interactions. This dissertation will thus connect the formal conventions of Rigvedic poetics to poet-patron power dynamics, negotiations across the human-divine power differential, and changing gender roles in ritualâall relatively new lines of inquiry.
1explore the fi rst-person experience of auditory hallucinations (also known as voices) in a community sample using a qualitative survey approach. Auditory hallucinations are common in psychiatric disorders, especially schizophrenia. During the past 10 years, researchers have learned that auditory hallucinations also occur in a small but notable proportion of the general population without the need for clinical care. However, very little is known about these individuals, and even less is known about their experience of hallucinations. Woods and colleagues’ study 1 gives a unique insight into the raw phenomenology of auditory hallucinations, undistorted by the clinical symptoms (eg, delusional interpretations) and cognitive compromise (eg, language disorders) that often accompany schizophrenia. Importantly, the fi ndings of the study show new and surprising themes that direct attention beyond the immediate scope and remit of speech, and towards a more global and integrated experience. In the past 30 years, studies have been constructed with preconceived ideas about auditory hallucinations being composed of abnormal language processes or misattributed inner speech, such that language and speech have become common constitutive elements of any investigations. This language-centric approach has shaped interrogative questions about these experiences, and clinicians often ask questions such as “Do you hear voices in your head? What do they say?” Thus, verbal and lexical characteristics have become the norm in descriptions of the dimensional forms and features of auditory hallucinations (eg, verbalisation, speech content, replays of conversations, and complexity of utterances), and as targets in dialogue-based forms of clinical interventions. Language and speech are important in some hallucinations, especially those related to schizophrenia. However, the fact that non-verbal auditory hallucinations are also common is often forgotten; for example, they occur in roughly 40% of individuals with schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders 2 and a substantial
Chest radiography is the primary and most important diagnostic study in the evaluation of neonates, due to life threating conditions. Neonatal chest images can be made using either contact-techniques or under-tray techniques, which one is superior in respect to doses and image quality? A range of exposure settings were made using a neonate phantom, and the same settings also for spatial resolution measurements. Visual scores were rated for spatial resolution tests, and for clinical phantom images rating present and absent pneumothorax. Entrance surface dose were below the European guidelines for certain exposure settings. The higher the dose, the less are images degraded by noise. The range of kV which is appropriate for the neonates is yet to be determined, though. The quality of the whole imaging chain interacts in a decision. Noise should be lowered whenever possible. Visual scores among two readers were close to each other’s, both in spatial resolution, and also in correct diagnostics in relation to noise magnitude, however 1/3 of the images illustrating pneumothorax were ignored. Exposure settings should probably not be equal for the contact and under-tray techniques. There were a tiny decrease in sharpness combined with an increased noise (average 20%) noted in the radiographs obtained from the under tray techniques compared with the contact techniques. Contact techniques were found being superior.
Abstract Individuals have many life experiences (e.g., work and vacations) that consist of a series of interconnected episodes (i.e., temporal sequences). Assessments of such experiences are integral to daily life in that they facilitate future planning and behaviors for individuals. Therefore, these experiences often culminate in evaluations of their global affect. Past work has shown that retrospective, affective evaluations of these sequences generally exhibit an “end effect,” whereby a sequence's end intensity—but not its start intensity—is disproportionately weighted. Yet, researchers have largely investigated experiences that occur alone. In contrast, many real‐world experiences vary in their extent of social connection to others (e.g., working in an office with others versus alone in a cubicle). The present work fills this gap by showing the moderating role of social connection on how episodes are weighted in global affective ratings. Five studies involving two autobiographical experiences spanning several days each (workweek and spring break) and two brief simulated experiences show that high social connection leads to greater (lesser) weighting of the first (last) episode. To our knowledge, we are the first to demonstrate that these effects persist across different forms of social connection (i.e., interpersonal interaction versus semantic priming tasks) and are supported regardless of whether social connection occurs at encoding or retrieval of an experience. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Mutual eye contact is a key aspect that accompanies any social interaction. Through mutual gaze we establish a communicative link with another person and inform him/her of our goals and motivations. While much attention has been directed to studying the mechanisms of perception / classification of gaze direction, we know very little on the temporal aspects of mutual gaze. We have all likely experienced instances of uncomfortable eye contact, while for example speaking with a stranger or standing in front of someone in an elevator. Here we studied in a very large subject pool (>400 participants) what constitutes a preferred time of mutual eye contact and how these estimates of preferred mutual gaze relate to participant eye behaviour. Participants viewed movies of actors (4 female, 4 male) establishing eye contact with them for variable amounts of time. At the end of each movie participants classified the period of mutual gaze as being “uncomfortably short” or “uncomfortably long”, thus yielding an estimate of “preferred” time of mutual gaze. We also collected ratings on a set face traits of the actor viewed in the clips. We found that the preferred period of mutual eye contact varied as a function of subjective ratings of actor threat, trustworthiness & attractiveness. Threatening faces were associated with lower periods of preferred eye contact, while conversely trustworthy faces were associated with longer periods of preferred mutual gaze. Analysis of patterns of eye fixations showed that fixations tend to be more concentrated in the actor’s eye region in participants exhibiting longer preferred periods of mutual gaze, suggesting that these participants are more likely to reciprocate the eye behaviour of the actor. Finally we also observed that the concentration of fixations in the actor’s eye region was also associated with higher dominance ratings. Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2015
Recent research reveals an age-related increase in positive autobiographical memory retrieval using a number of positivity measures, including valence ratings and positive word use. It is currently unclear whether the positivity shift in each of these measures co-occurs, or if age uniquely influences multiple components of autobiographical memory retrieval. The current study examined the correspondence between valence ratings and emotional word use in young and older adults' autobiographical memories. Positive word use in narratives was associated with valence ratings only in young adults' narratives. Older adults' narratives contained a consistent level of positive word use regardless of valence rating, suggesting that positive words and concepts may be chronically accessible to older adults during memory retrieval, regardless of subjective valence. Although a relation between negative word use in narratives and negative valence ratings was apparent in both young and older adults, it was stronger in older adults' narratives. These findings confirm that older adults do vary their word use in accordance with subjective valence, but they do so in a way that is different from young adults. The results also point to a potential dissociation between age-related changes in subjective valence and in positive word use.
The purpose of this study was to reveal the effects of Westernized arrangements of traditional Korean folk music on music familiarity and preference. Two separate labs in one intact class were assigned to one of two treatment groups of either listening to traditional Korean folk songs ( n = 18) or listening to Western arrangements of the same Korean folk songs ( n = 22); a second intact class served as a control group with no listening ( n = 20). Before and after the listening treatment session, pre- and posttests were administered that included 12 music excerpts of current popular, Western classical, and traditional Korean music. Results showed that participants who listened to traditional folk songs demonstrated significant increases in both familiarity and preference ratings; however, those who listened to Westernized folk songs showed increases only in familiarity ratings but not preference ratings for the same Korean songs in traditional versions. An analysis of participants’ open-ended responses showed that affective–positive responses were used most frequently when explaining preference for traditional versions of Korean folk songs (28.1%) among the traditional Korean listening group; structural–negative reasons (47.8%) were the most frequent among the Westernized listening group.
In this work we suggest a novel Text Categorization (TC) scenario, motivated by an ad-hoc industrial need to assign documents to a set of predefined categories, while labeled training data for the categories is not available. The scenario is applicable in many industrial settings and is interesting from the academic perspective. We present a new dataset geared for the main characteristics of the scenario, and utilize it to investigate the name-based TC approach, which uses the category names as its only input and does not require training data. We evaluate and analyze the performance of state-of-the-art methods for this dataset to identify the shortcomings of these methods for our scenario, and suggest ways for overcoming these shortcomings. We utilize statistical correlation measured over a target corpus for improving the state-of-the-art, and offer a different classification scheme based on the characteristics of the setting. We evaluate our improvements and adaptations and show superior performance of our suggested method.
Prior research with four-part analogies suggests that people can detect that a novel word pair (e.g., "beaver:dam") maps analogically onto a pair in memory (e.g., "robin:nest") despite being unable to retrieve the pair from memory that is driving that detection. The present study demonstrates that the same type of detection during retrieval failure can occur when a story is used at test to illustrate a common aphorism that failed to be retrieved from an earlier list (e.g., "The squeaky wheel gets the grease" or "A watched pot never boils"). Given that prior research has suggested that analogy is related to insight, the present study also examined if such analogical detection during retrieval failure is related to the sense of presque vu, which is a term used to describe the subjective sense of an impending insight or discovery. Reports of presque vu during retrieval failure were associated with higher familiarity ratings. Participants were most likely to report presque vu after failing to identify the aphorism on the first attempt but before succeeding on the second attempt (relative to succeeding on the first attempt or failing altogether on both attempts). Additionally, instances of successful identification on the second attempt after a failed first attempt were more likely when presque vu was reported than when it was not. These patterns suggest that reports of presque vu may indicate impending retrieval of as yet unretrieved relevant information. However, instances of successful second attempt identification after initial failure occurred too infrequently to fully examine whether analogical resemblance to an unretrieved studied aphorism interacted with these patterns.
Researchers have demonstrated the importance of phonology in literacy acquisition and in visual word recognition. For example, the spelling-to-sound consistency effect has been observed in visual word recognition tasks, in which the naming responses are faster and more accurate for words with the same letters that also have the same pronunciation (e.g. -ean is always pronounced /in/, as in lean, dean, and bean). In addition, some studies have reported a much less intuitive feedback consistency effect when a rime can be spelled in different ways (e.g. /ip/ in heap and deep) in lexical decision tasks. Such findings suggest that, with activation flowing back and forth between orthographic and phonological units during word processing, any inconsistency in the mappings between orthography and phonology should weaken the stability of the feedback loop, and, thus, should delay recognition. However, several studies have failed to show reliable feedback consistency in printed word recognition. One possible reason for this is that the feedback consistency is naturally confounded with many other variables, such as orthographic neighborhood or bigram frequency, as these variables are difficult to tease apart. Furthermore, there are challenges in designing factorial experiments that perfectly balance lexical stimuli on all factors besides feedback consistency. This study aims to examine the feedback consistency effect in reading Chinese characters by using a normative data of 3,423 Chinese phonograms. We collected the lexical decision time from 180 college students. A linear mixed model analysis was used to examine the feedback consistency effect by taking into account additional properties that may be confounded with feedback consistency, including character frequency, number of strokes, phonetic combinability, semantic combinability, semantic ambiguity, phonetic consistency, noun-to-verb ratios, and morphological boundedness. Some typical effects were observed, such as the more frequent and familiar a character, the faster one can decide it is a real character. More importantly, the linear mixed model analysis revealed a significant feedback consistency effect while controlling for other factors, which indicated that the pronunciation of phonograms might accommodate the organization of Chinese orthographic representation. Our study disentangled the feedback consistency from the many other factors, and supports the view that phonological activation would reverberate to orthographic representation in visual word recognition.
Sleep supports the consolidation of declarative memory in children and adults. However, it is unclear whether sleep improves odor memory in children as well as adults. Thirty healthy children (mean age of 10.6, ranging from 8-12 yrs.) and 30 healthy adults (mean age of 25.4, ranging from 20-30 yrs.) participated in an incidental odor recognition paradigm. While learning of 10 target odorants took place in the evening and retrieval (10 target and 10 distractor odorants) the next morning in the sleep groups (adults: n = 15, children: n = 15), the time schedule was vice versa in the wake groups (n = 15 each). During encoding, adults rated odors as being more familiar. After the retention interval, adult participants of the sleep group recognized odors better than adults in the wake group. While children in the wake group showed memory performance comparable to the adult wake group, the children sleep group performed worse than adult and children wake groups. Correlations between memory performance and familiarity ratings during encoding indicate that pre-experiences might be critical in determining whether sleep improves or worsens memory consolidation.
How do we know that a kitchen is a kitchen by looking? Here we start with the intuition that although scenes consist of visual features and objects, scene categories should reflect how we use category information. In our daily lives, rather than asking ourselves whether we are in (for example) a “beach” scene, we tend to use scene category information for actions such as navigation and search. Because we act within scenes, we test the hypothesis that scene categories arise from scene functions. We collected a large-scale scene category similarity matrix (5 million trials) by asking observers to simply decide whether two images were from the same or different categories. To serve as a noise ceiling (maximum possible correlation) for comparison among computational models, we used boostrapping to compute the correlation among observers (r=0.75). Using the actions from the American Time Use Survey, we normed these scenes by what actions could be done in each scene (1.4 million trials). We found a strong relationship between category distance and functional distance (r=0.50, or 66% of the maximum possible correlation from noise ceiling). Furthermore, the function-based model outperformed alternative models of object-based similarity (r=0.33), visual features from a convolutional neural network (r=0.39), lexical distance between category names (r=0.27), and models of simple visual features such as color histograms (r=0.09), gabor wavelets (r=0.07), and gist descriptor (r=0.11). Using hierarchical linear regression, we found that functions captured 85.5% of overall explained variance, with nearly half of the explained variance captured only by functions, implying that the predictive power of alternative models was due to their shared variance with the function-based model. These results challenge the dominant school of thought that visual features and objects are sufficient for categorization, and provide immediately testable hypotheses about the functional organization of the human visual system. Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2015
In surveys, individuals tend to misreport behaviors that are in contrast to prevalent social norms or regulations. Several design features of the survey procedure have been suggested to counteract this problem; particularly, computerized surveys are supposed to elicit more truthful responding. This assumption was tested in a meta-analysis of survey experiments reporting 460 effect sizes (total N =125,672). Self-reported prevalence rates of several sensitive behaviors for which motivated misreporting has been frequently observed were compared across self-administered paper-and-pencil versus computerized surveys. The results revealed that computerized surveys led to significantly more reporting of socially undesirable behaviors than comparable surveys administered on paper. This effect was strongest for highly sensitive behaviors and surveys administered individually to respondents. Moderator analyses did not identify interviewer effects or benefits of audio-enhanced computer surveys. The meta-analysis highlighted the advantages of computerized survey modes for the assessment of sensitive topics.
The ability to integrate contextual information is important for the comprehension of emotional and social situations. While some studies have shown that emotional processes and social cognition are impaired in people with hypomanic personality trait, no results have been reported concerning the neurophysiological processes mediating the processing of emotional information during the integration of contextual social information in this population. We therefore chose to conduct an ERP study dealing with the integration of emotional information in a population with hypomanic personality trait. Healthy participants were evaluated using the Hypomanic Personality Scale (HPS), and ERPs were recorded during a linguistic task in which participants silently read sentence pairs describing short social situations. The first sentence implicitly conveyed the positive or negative emotional state of a character. The second sentence was emotionally congruent or incongruent with the first sentence. We)
The Syntax of Dutch (SoD) is a descriptive and detailed grammar of Dutch, that provides data for many issues raised in linguistic theory. We present the results of a pilot project that investigated the possibility of enriching the online version of the text with links to queries that provide relevant results from syntactically annotated corpora.
Psychologists have used experimental methods to study language for more than a century. However, only with the recent availability of large-scale linguistic databases has a more complete picture begun to emerge of how language is actually used, and what information is available as input to language acquisition. Analyses of such "big data" have resulted in reappraisals of key assumptions about the nature of language. As an example, we focus on corpus-based research that has shed new light on the arbitrariness of the sign: the longstanding assumption that the relationship between the sound of a word and its meaning is arbitrary. The results reveal a systematic relationship between the sound of a word and its meaning, which is stronger for early acquired words. Moreover, the analyses further uncover a systematic relationship between words and their lexical categories-nouns and verbs sound differently from each other-affecting how we learn new words and use them in sentences. Together, these results point to a division of labor between arbitrariness and systematicity in sound-meaning mappings. We conclude by arguing in favor of including "big data" analyses into the language scientist's methodological toolbox.
The names of people, locations, and organisations play a central role in language, and named entity recognition (NER) has been widely studied, and successfully incorporated, into natural language processing (NLP) applications. The most common variant of NER involves identifying and classifying proper noun mentions of these and miscellaneous entities as linear spans in text. Unfortunately, this version of NER is no closer to a detailed treatment of named entities than chunking is to a full syntactic analysis. NER, so construed, reflects neither the syntactic nor semantic structure of NE mentions, and provides insufficient categorical distinctions to represent that structure. Representing this nested structure, where a mention may contain mention(s) of other entities, is critical for applications such as coreference resolution. The lack of this structure creates spurious ambiguity in the linear approximation. Research in NER has been shaped by the size and detail of the available annotated corpora. The existing structured named entity corpora are either small, in specialist domains, or in languages other than English. This thesis presents our Nested Named Entity (NNE) corpus of named entities and numerical and temporal expressions, taken from the WSJ portion of the Penn Treebank (PTB, Marcus et al., 1993). We use the BBN Pronoun Coreference and Entity Type Corpus (Weischedel and Brunstein, 2005a) as our basis, manually annotating it with a principled, fine-grained, nested annotation scheme and detailed annotation guidelines. The corpus comprises over 279,000 entities over 49,211 sentences (1,173,000 words), including 118,495 top-level entities. Our annotations were designed using twelve high-level principles that guided the development of the annotation scheme and difficult decisions for annotators. We also monitored the semantic grammar that was being induced during annotation, seeking to identify and reinforce common patterns to maintain consistent, parsimonious annotations. The result is a scheme of 118 hierarchical fine-grained entity types and nesting rules, covering all capitalised mentions of entities, and numerical and temporal expressions. Unlike many corpora, we have developed detailed guidelines, including extensive discussion of the edge cases, in an ongoing dialogue with our annotators which is critical for consistency and reproducibility. We annotated independently from the PTB bracketing, allowing annotators to choose spans which were inconsistent with the PTB conventions and errors, and only refer back to it to resolve genuine ambiguity consistently. We merged our NNE with the PTB, requiring some systematic and one-off changes to both annotations. This allows the NNE corpus to complement other PTB resources, such as PropBank, and inform PTB-derived corpora for other formalisms, such as CCG and HPSG. We compare this corpus against BBN. We consider several approaches to integrating the PTB and NNE annotations, which affect the sparsity of grammar rules and visibility of syntactic and NE structure. We explore their impact on parsing the NNE and merged variants using the Berkeley parser (Petrov et al., 2006), which performs surprisingly well without specialised NER features. We experiment with flattening the NNE annotations into linear NER variants with stacked categories, and explore the ability of a maximum entropy and a CRF NER system to reproduce them. The CRF performs substantially better, but is infeasible to train on the enormous stacked category sets. The flattened output of the Berkeley parser are almost competitive with the CRF. Our results demonstrate that the NNE corpus is feasible for statistical models to reproduce. We invite researchers to explore new, richer models of (joint) parsing and NER on this complex and challenging task. Our nested named entity corpus will improve a wide range of NLP tasks, such as coreference resolution and question answering, allowing automated systems to understand and exploit the true structure of named entities.
Multilingual digital resources with Bulgarian languageThe paper presents in brief Bulgarian language resources as a part of multilingual digital resources developed in the frame of some international projects, among them parallel annotated and aligned corpora, comparable corpora, morpho-syntactic specifications for corpora annotation and dictionaries encoding, lexicons, lexical databases, and electronic dictionaries.
We examine the nature of phonological and semantic similarity\nin early language learning. We consider how the use of this\ninformation might change over the course of development. To\nthis end, we represent the lexicon as either a phonological or\nsemantic network and model the growth of this network. Constructing\nnormative vocabularies from the Communicative Development\nInventory norms, we utilize a preferential attachment\ngrowth algorithm. We predict and quantify the words\nwhich will be learned next, comparing the two network representations.\nWe consider the effect of age, total vocabulary size\nand language ability as measured through CDI percentile. Our\nfindings suggest that the semantic representation does not outperform\nthe baseline bag-of-words model, whereas the phonological\nrepresentation conditionally does. More generally, we\nshow that the network representation influences the ability of\na model to capture vocabulary growth. We further offer a\nmethod of analysis for testing representational assumptions in\nnetwork models.