Papers reviewed and determined not to be word norm studies. Use the flag icon to report errors or suggest re-inclusion.
18265 papers
We tested whether the intervening time between multiple glances influences the independence of the resulting visual percepts. Observers estimated how many dots were present in brief displays that repeated one, two, three, four, or a random number of trials later. Estimates made farther apart in time were more independent, and thus carried more information about the stimulus when combined. In addition, estimates from different visual field locations were more independent than estimates from the same location. Our results reveal a retinotopic serial dependence in visual numerosity estimates, which may be a mechanism for maintaining the continuity of visual perception in a noisy environment. [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 multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for indivi)
Introduction Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI) can be used for communication and motor restoration (Birbaumer & Cohen, 2007). To our knowledge, no BCI study looked at patients with dementia who have severe communication deficits. BCIs based on operant training could be problematic for patients with cognitive deficits. A paradigm shift from instrumental-operant learning to classical conditioning could possibly overcome this failure (Birbaumer, 2006). Recent findings demonstrated the possibility to classify cognitive and emotional states by the pattern classification of BOLD signals in both offline (Lee et al., 2010a, 2010b) and online situations (Sitaram et al., 2010). The present study aims to investigate the feasibility of an auditory classical conditioning paradigm within a fMRI based BCI setting. The paradigm is designed to condition individuals to associate positive and negative emotional stimuli as unconditioned stimuli (US) with congruent and incongruent word pairs as conditioned stimuli (CS), respectively. Our goal is to ascertain whether the brain signals pertaining to congruent and incongruent word pairs could be classified with more than chance accuracy using our fMRI support vector machine (SVM) with a view to apply for basic online yes/no communication in Alzheimer patients. Methods The paradigm consisted of one single session divided into six blocks, comprising the different phases of conditioning (habituation, acquisition, extinction). The US consisted of auditory emotional stimuli selected from the International Affective Digitized Sounds (IADS, Bradley & Lang, 1999). A segment of baby laughter represented the positive emotional stimulus and a segment of screaming represented the negative emotional stimulus. The CS, presented aurally, were congruent (e.g. ‘animal-elephant’) and incongruent (e.g. ‘animal-Germany’) word-pairs. The unconditioned and conditioned responses (UR and CR) were the changes in the BOLD signal pertaining to the CS and US, respectively. The first block consisted of a randomized presentation of 50 US and 50 CS. In the second and third blocks 25 congruent word pairs, immediately followed by the baby laughter, and 25 incongruent word pairs, immediately followed by the scream, were presented randomly. In the fourth and fifth blocks, respectively 40% and 20% of the CS were paired with the US. In the sixth block, only the CS was presented. Functional imaging was performed continuously during these blocks on 6 healthy subjects (4 females, 2 males, age 21-27) on a 3.0 T scanner (Siemens, Germany). To classify the signals corresponding to various conditions, namely congruent and incongruent word-pairs, a linear SVM (with the regularization parameter, C=1) was implemented. Classification performance from data was evaluated through 2-fold cross validation (CV). Based on the parameters of the trained SVM model, we analyzed the fMRI data with the Effect Mapping method (EM; Lee et al., 2010a, 2010b, Sitaram et al., 2010). To investigate the relative importance of different brain regions in decoding the conditioning brain states, feature vectors from the frontal cortex were used as input to build a separate SVM classifier. Results The Self Assessment Manikin (SAM) test showed that participants reported more negative valence and a higher arousal for the scream compared to the baby laughter. Classification of the BOLD signal as a response to the congruent and incongruent word pairs immediately followed by the emotional US showed above chance level performance (57-64%) on one subject, around chance level (50-56%) performance on three subjects, and below chance level (44-47%) performance on two subjects. Conclusions In this pilot study we have demonstrated an approach for conditioning the BOLD signal by repeated association of the emotional stimuli with semantic stimuli, resulting in a paradigm for basic yes/no communication. Further work includes improving the performance of the classifier by feature selection, an online implementation of the system, and its testing on patients. References: Birbaumer, N. (2006), ‘Brain-computer-interface research: coming of age’, Clinical Neurophysiology, vol. 117, pp. 479-483. Birbaumer, N. & Cohen, L. G. (2007), ‘Brain-computer interfaces: communication and restoration of movement in paralysis’, The Journal of Physiology, vol. 579, no. 3, pp. 621-636. Bradley, M. M. & Lang, P. J. (1999), ‘International Affective Digitized Sounds (IADS): Stimuli, instruction manual and affective ratings’, University of Florida, Gainesville. Sitaram R, Lee S, Ruiz S, Rana M, Veit R, Birbaumer N. Real-time support vector classification and feedback of multiple emotional brain states. Neuroimage, 2010 Aug 6. Lee, S., Halder, S., Kübler, A., Birbaumer, N., Sitaram, R. Effective functional mapping of fMRI data with support-vector machines. Hum Brain Mapp. 2010a, Jan 28. Lee, S., Ruiz, S., Caria, A., Birbaumer, N., Sitaram, R Cerebral reorganization induced by real-time fMRI feedback training of the insular cortex: a multivariate investigation. Neuroreh and Neural Rep (2010b).
Neuropsychological and imaging studies have shown that the left supramarginal gyrus (SMG) is specifically involved in processing spatial terms (e.g. above, left of), which locate places and objects in the world. The current fMRI study focused on the nature and specificity of representing spatial language in the left SMG by combining behavioral and neuronal activation data in blind and sighted individuals. Data from the blind provide an elegant way to test the supramodal representation hypothesis, i.e. abstract codes representing spatial relations yielding no activation differences between blind and sighted. Indeed, the left SMG was activated during spatial language processing in both blind and sighted individuals implying a supramodal representation of spatial and other dimensional relations which does not require visual experience to develop. However, in the absence of vision functional reorganization of the visual cortex is known to take place. An important consideration with respec)
The paper deals with the macrostructure of the Pralex lexical database and with the basic principles of building an index, mainly with the choice of sources and with criteria of the choice of lexical units including possibilities of their future completion from own sources of the Institute.
It is hypothesized that ratings of emotional stimuli are affected by a constant threat of traumatic events. Ratings of valence and arousal on the International Affective Picture System from young adults in the United States were compared to those of young Israeli adults. Israelis rated the pictures as less negative and less positive than did participants from the United States. Israeli women gave higher arousal ratings compared to the American women. These differences may be due to compulsory military service in Israel, during which exposure to traumatic events is more likely to occur, and to the timing of the study which followed a year of frequent suicide bomb attacks. The authors suggest that these findings may reflect mild symptoms of stress disorders.
This paper examines the ways in which par-allelism can be used to speed the parsing of dense PCFGs. We focus on two kinds of parallelism here: Symmetric Multi-Processing (SMP) parallelism on shared-memory multi-core CPUs, and Single-Instruction Multiple-Thread (SIMT) parallelism on GPUs. We de-scribe how to achieve speed-ups over an al-ready very efficient baseline parser using both kinds of technology. For our dense PCFG parsing task we obtained a 60×speed-up us-ing SMP and SSE parallelism coupled with a cache-sensitive algorithm design, parsing sec-tion 24 of the Penn WSJ treebank in a little over 2 secs. 1
This paper presents a taxonomy of cognitive functions that supports formal functional modeling of cognitive technical systems (CTSs) and cognitive products. To date, there is little support for functional modeling of such systems and products even though their interdisciplinary complexity exceeds that of electro-mechanical products and makes modeling support in conceptual design even more important. The taxonomy of cognitive functions is based on literature research and consists of a set of cognitive capabilities on three hierarchical levels as well as a defined set of flows. Relationships among cognitive capabilities have been identified using WordNet, a lexical database of English. The application of the taxonomy is demonstrated through the example of a coffee robot waiter, which has been designed and prototyped in the research group of the authors. Through defining a common taxonomy of cognitive functions and flows, a common practice for functional modeling of cognitive products is defined thus supporting re-use of functional models. This creates the foundation for creating model-based design repositories for CTSs and cognitive products to support their future development.
OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this article is to evaluate the use of the periodically rotated overlapping parallel lines with enhanced reconstruction (PROPELLER) technique for artifact reduction and overall image quality improvement for intermediate-weighted and T2-weighted MRI of the shoulder. SUBJECTS AND METHODS: One hundred eleven patients undergoing MR arthrography of the shoulder were included. A coronal oblique intermediate-weighted turbo spin-echo (TSE) sequence with fat suppression and a sagittal oblique T2-weighted TSE sequence with fat suppression were obtained without (standard) and with the PROPELLER technique. Scanning time increased from 3 minutes 17 seconds to 4 minutes 17 seconds (coronal oblique plane) and from 2 minutes 52 seconds to 4 minutes 10 seconds (sagittal oblique) using PROPELLER. Two radiologists graded image artifacts, overall image quality, and delineation of several anatomic structures on a 5-point scale (5, no artifact, optimal diagnostic quality; and 1, severe artifacts, diagnostically not usable). The Wilcoxon signed rank test was used to compare the data of the standard and PROPELLER images. RESULTS: Motion artifacts were significantly reduced in PROPELLER images (p < 0.001). Observer 1 rated motion artifacts with diagnostic impairment in one patient on coronal oblique PROPELLER images compared with 33 patients on standard images. Ratings for the sequences with PROPELLER were significantly better for overall image quality (p < 0.001). Observer 1 noted an overall image quality with diagnostic impairment in nine patients on sagittal oblique PROPELLER images compared with 23 patients on standard MRI. CONCLUSION: The PROPELLER technique for MRI of the shoulder reduces the number of sequences with diagnostic impairment as a result of motion artifacts and increases image quality compared with standard TSE sequences. PROPELLER sequences increase the acquisition time.
Music listeners have difficulty correctly understanding and remembering song lyrics. However, results from the present study support the hypothesis that young adults can learn African-American English (AAE) vocabulary from listening to hiphop music. Non-African-American participants first gave free-response definitions to AAE vocabulary items, after which they answered demographic questions as well as questions addressing their social networks, their musical preferences, and their knowledge of popular culture. Results from the survey show a positive association between the number of hip-hop artists listened to and AAE comprehension vocabulary scores. Additionally, participants were more likely to know an AAE vocabulary item if the hip-hop artists they listen to use the word in their song lyrics. Together, these results suggest that young adults can acquire vocabulary through exposure to hip-hop music, a finding relevant for research on vocabulary acquisition, the construction of adole)
Network analysis has demonstrated that systems ranging from social networks to electric power grids often involve a small world structure-with local clustering but global ac cess. Critically, small world structure has also been shown to characterize adult human semantic networks. Moreover, the connectivity pattern of these mature networks is consistent with lexical growth processes in which children add new words to their vocabulary based on the structure of the language-learning environment. However, thus far, there is no direct evidence that a child's individual semantic network structure is associated with their early language learning. Here we show that, while typically developing children's early networks show small world structure as early as 15 months and with as few as 55 words, children with language delay (late talkers) have this structure to a smaller degree. This implicates a maladaptive bias in word acquisition for late talkers, potentially indicating a preference for ''o)
Nous montrons comment enrichir une annotation en dependances syntaxiques au format du French Treebank de Paris 7 en utilisant la reecriture de graphes, en vue du calcul de sa representation semantique. Le systeme de reecriture est compose de regles grammaticales et lexicales structurees en modules. Les regles lexicales utilisent une information de controle extraite du lexique des verbes francais Dicovalence.
This article provides recent empirical evidence to support the argument that the everyday politics of race and fear of the non-desired Other still persist in Australia more than half a century after the official demise of the White Australia Policy. The article sheds so me insight into how Australian immigration policies are now deliberately designed to normalise and assimilate new migrants into narrow Anglo-Saxon cultural and linguistic norms, thereby inadvertently excluding people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds who need Australian citizenship the most. The argument of the article is based on outcomes of a study on personal stories of African refugee background Australian citizens regarding their experiences with the Australian citizenship test; their opinions about the literacy-for-citizenship requirement; and their ideas about being and becoming Australian. The participants to the study expressed strong reservations with the idea of having to undertake a formal citizenship test that neither improves their understanding of the everyday way of life in Australia nor opens avenues for greater opportunities for socio-economic participation and recognition of the linguistic and cultural identities they bring to Australia.
Recent advances in parsing technology have made treebank parsing with discontinuous constituents possible, with parser output of competitive quality (Kallmeyer and Maier, 2010). We apply Data-Oriented Parsing (DOP) to a grammar formalism that allows for discontinuous trees (LCFRS). Decisions during parsing are conditioned on all possible fragments, resulting in improved performance. Despite the fact that both DOP and discontinuity present formidable challenges in terms of computational complexity, the model is reasonably efficient, and surpasses the state of the art in discontinuous parsing. 1
Abstract. FrameNet frames have been used to develop lexical databases and annotated corpora for different languages. This paper analyses the use of FrameNet frames to build a legal ontology for the Brazilian Law. In order to discuss the problems of such approach to ontology development, the lexical units evoking the Criminal_process frame were contrasted in English and Portuguese. Frame divergence between languages has consequences not only for legal ontology development but also for the development of legal lexical resources, such as lexical databases and corpora annotation. 1.
FinnWordNet is a wordnet for Finnish that complies with the format of the Princeton WordNet (PWN) (Fellbaum, 1998).It was built by translating the Princeton WordNet 3.0 synsets into Finnish by human translators.It is open source and contains 117000 synsets.The Finnish translations were inserted into the PWN structure resulting in a bilingual lexical database.In natural language processing (NLP), wordnets have been used for infusing computers with semantic knowledge assuming that humans already have a sufficient amount of this knowledge.In this paper we present a case study of using wordnets as an electronic dictionary.We tested whether native Finnish speakers benefit from using a wordnet while completing English sentence completion tasks.We found that using either an English wordnet or a bilingual English-Finnish wordnet significantly improves performance in the task.This should be taken into account when setting standards and comparing human and computer performance on these tasks.
This chapter presents a meta-search approach, meant to deliver bibliography from the internet, according to trainees’ results obtained at an e-assessment task. The bibliography consists of web pages related to the knowledge gaps of the trainees. The meta-search engine is part of an education recommender system, attached to an e-assessment application for project management knowledge. Meta-search means that, for a specific query (or mistake made by the trainee), several search mechanisms for suitable bibliography (further reading) could be applied. The lists of results delivered by the standard search mechanisms are used to build thematically homogenous groups using an ontology-based clustering algorithm. The clustering process uses an educational ontology and WordNet lexical database to create its categories. The research is presented in the context of recommender systems and their various applications to the education domain.
Among the most salient and extensively researched phonological processes of Caribbean Spanish after the categorical weakening of /-s / is the prolific behavior of the implosive or post-nuclear liquids // and /l/. It has been repeatedly claimed yet remarkably unsubstantiated that the gemination of word-medial, post-nuclear liquids to a following consonantal segment is a pervasive characteristic of Cuban Spanish, particularly of the western dialect region. To this end, the fundamental objective of the present study was to acoustically investigate said-phenomenon as it is purported to occur in the province of Havana, whose capital city models the linguistic norm for the rest of the country. Speech samples were elicited from twenty-four native speakers and spectrographic analysis was performed on these collected tokens in order to precisely identify the characteristics of both liquids in the above-mentioned segmental environment. Although we did not find any evidence of liquid gemination in the 120 words under analysis, we did observe two systematic and conditioned processes that may potentially help account for the impressionistic identification of gemination in word-internal position: 1) the insertion of an excrescent vowel between all [.C] sequences; and 2) an increase in the duration of the closure of the stop positionally subsequent to /-L / → [Ø] by an average 30.9%. In light of the evident lack of empirical studies dedicated to the allophony of final liquids, we believe the implications of the findings in this investigation to be important for Caribbean Spanish in general and Cuban Spanish in particular and hope that this study may provide a foundation for future work on the phenomenon of liquid gemination.
In this paper we aim to briefly review Eugenio Coseriu’s ideas regarding synonymy and some Coserian disciples’ contributions (be they direct or indirect) concerning this issue. The largest part of this article, however, presents our own contribution to the study of synonymy, whose starting point was Coseriu’s integral linguistics, considered as an epistemological frame of reference. We have tried to apply, within the general study of synonymy (lexical, phraseological and lexico-phraseological), distinctions such as: language as activity [enérgeia], competence [dýnamis] and product [érgon] to its three levels (universal, historical and individual); norm and system; historical language and functional language, etc. As far as we are concerned, we were interested in pointing out, for each of Coseriu’s levels in turn, the difference between synonymy in actu (the real one) and synonymy in potentia (the virtual or potential one). We also aimed at drawing attention to the importance of competence (mainly the idiomatic and expressive ones) in the analysis of different types of synonymy as “knowledge” in using the synonyms.
A method for deriving an approximately labeled dependency treebank from the Thai Categorial Grammar Treebank has been implemented. The method involves a lexical dictionary for assigning dependency directions to the CG types associated with the grammatical entities in the CG bank, falling back on a generic mapping of CG types in case of unknown words. Currently, all but a handful of the trees in the Thai CG bank can unambiguously be transformed into directed dependency trees. Dependency labels can optionally be assigned with a learned classifier, which in a preliminary evaluation with a very small training set achieves 76.5% label accuracy. In the process, a number of annotation errors in the CG bank were identified and corrected. Although rather limited in its coverage, excluding e.g. long-distance dependencies, topicalisations and longer sentences, the resulting treebank is believed to be sound in terms of structural annotational consistency and a valuable complement to the scarce Thai language resources in existence.
A method for deriving an approximately labeled dependency treebank from the Thai Categorial Grammar Treebank has been implemented. The method involves a lexical dictionary for assigning dependency directions to the CG types associated with the grammatical entities in the CG bank, falling back on a generic mapping of CG types in case of unknown words. Currently, all but a handful of the trees in the Thai CG bank can unambiguously be transformed into directed dependency trees. Dependency labels can optionally be assigned with a learned classifier, which in a preliminary evaluation with a very small training set achieves 76.5% label accuracy. In the process, a number of annotation errors in the CG bank were identified and corrected. Although rather limited in its coverage, excluding e.g. long-distance dependencies, topicalisations and longer sentences, the resulting treebank is believed to be sound in terms of structural annotational consistency and a valuable complement to the scarce Thai language resources in existence.
Named Entity Recognition (NER) is an important first step for BioNLP tasks, e.g., gene normalization and event extraction. Employing supervised machine learning techniques for achieving high performance recent NER systems require a manually annotated corpus in which every mention of the desired semantic types in a text is annotated. However, great amounts of human effort is necessary to build and maintain an annotated corpus. This study explores a method to build a high-performance NER without a manually annotated corpus, but using a comprehensible lexical database that stores numerous expressions of semantic types and with huge amount of unannotated texts. We underscore the effectiveness of our approach by comparing the performance of NERs trained on an automatically acquired training data and on a manually annotated corpus. 1
Deep semantic parsing is the key to understand sentence meaning. This paper integrates some Chinese semantic relation systems given by different scholars, and presents a more comprehensive system for semantic dependency parsing. The new semantic relation system includes the definition for the situation that a verb acts as a modifier and a verbal noun acts as the center of the noun phrase. According to the relation system, a large scale Chinese semantic dependency relation tree bank is constructed by the combination of automatic and manual means. This semantic dependency tree bank will become a basis of studying deep semantic parsing.
We present a novel approach to Data-Oriented Parsing (DOP). Like other DOP models, our parser utilizes syntactic fragments of arbitrary size from a treebank to analyze new sentences, but, crucially, it uses only those which are encountered at least twice. This criterion al-lows us to work with a relatively small but representative set of fragments, which can be employed as the symbolic backbone of sev-eral probabilistic generative models. For pars-ing we define a transform-backtransform ap-proach that allows us to use standard PCFG technology, making our results easily replica-ble. According to standard Parseval metrics, our best model is on par with many state-of-the-art parsers, while offering some comple-mentary benefits: a simple generative proba-bility model, and an explicit representation of the larger units of grammar. 1
BACKGROUND: Traumatized individuals and particularly post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) patients are characterized by memory disturbances that suggest altered memory control. The present study investigated the issue using an item method, directed forgetting (DF) paradigm in 51 civil war victims in Uganda. All participants had been exposed to severe traumatic stress and 26 additionally suffered from PTSD. METHOD: In an item cued, DF paradigm photographs were presented, each followed by an instruction to either remember or forget it. A recognition test for all initially presented photographs and thematically similar distracters followed. DF patterns were compared between the non-PTSD and the PTSD groups. Post-experimental ratings of picture valence and arousal were collected and correlated with DF. RESULTS: Results revealed DF, that is, reduced recognition for 'to-be-forgotten' items in the non-PTSD but not in the PTSD group. Moreover, in the non-PTSD, but not in the PTSD group, false alarms were reduced for 'to-be-remembered' items. Finally, DF was reduced in those participants who rated the pictures as more arousing, the PTSD group giving, on average, higher arousal ratings. CONCLUSIONS: Data indicate that DF is reduced in PTSD and that the reduction is related to stimulus arousal. Furthermore, individuals with PTSD are characterized by a more global encoding style than individuals without PTSD, reflected in a higher false alarm rate. In sum, traumatized individuals with (but not without) PTSD are impaired in their ability to selectively control episodic memory encoding. This impairment may contribute to clinical features of the disorder such as intrusions and flashbacks.
Two experiments examined the effects of repetition on listeners' emotional response to music. Listeners heard recordings of orchestral music that contained a large section repeated twice. The music had a symmetric phrase structure (same-length phrases) in Experiment 1 and an asymmetric phrase structure (different-length phrases) in Experiment 2, hypothesized to alter the predictability of sensitivity to musical repetition. Continuous measures of arousal and valence were compared across music that contained identical repetition, variation (related), or contrasting (unrelated) structure. Listeners' emotional arousal ratings differed most for contrasting music, moderately for variations, and least for repeating musical segments. A computational model for the detection of repeated musical segments was applied to the listeners' emotional responses. The model detected the locations of phrase boundaries from the emotional responses better than from performed tempo or physical intensity in both experiments. These findings indicate the importance of repetition in listeners' emotional response to music and in the perceptual segmentation of musical structure.
We propose a relaxed correspondence assumption for cross-lingual projection of constituent syntax, which allows a supposed constituent of the target sentence to correspond to an unrestricted treelet in the source parse. Such a relaxed assumption fundamentally tolerates the syntactic non-isomorphism between languages, and enables us to learn the target-language-specific syntactic idiosyncrasy rather than a strained grammar directly projected from the source language syntax. Based on this assumption, a novel constituency projection method is also proposed in order to induce a projected constituent treebank from the source-parsed bilingual corpus. Experiments show that, the parser trained on the projected treebank dramatically outperforms previous projected and unsupervised parsers. 1
Historical linguistics aims at inferring the most likely language phylogenetic tree starting from information concerning the evolutionary relatedness of languages. The available information are typically lists of homologous (lexical, phonological, syntactic) features or characters for many different languages: a set of parallel corpora whose compilation represents a paramount achievement in linguistics. From this perspective the reconstruction of language trees is an example of inverse problems: starting from present, incomplete and often noisy, information, one aims at inferring the most likely past evolutionary history. A fundamental issue in inverse problems is the evaluation of the inference made. A standard way of dealing with this question is to generate data with artificial models in order to have full access to the evolutionary process one is going to infer. This procedure presents an intrinsic limitation: when dealing with real data sets, one typically does not know which model of evolution is the most suitable for them. A possible way out is to compare algorithmic inference with expert classifications. This is the point of view we take here by conducting a thorough survey of the accuracy of reconstruction methods as compared with the Ethnologue expert classifications. We focus in particular on state-of-the-art distance-based methods for phylogeny reconstruction using worldwide linguistic databases. In order to assess the accuracy of the inferred trees we introduce and characterize two generalizations of standard definitions of distances between trees. Based on these scores we quantify the relative performances of the distance-based algorithms considered. Further we quantify how the completeness and the coverage of the available databases affect the accuracy of the reconstruction. Finally we draw some conclusions about where the accuracy of the reconstructions in historical linguistics stands and about the leading directions to improve it.
Parallel treebanks with annotation of syntax, discourse, coreference, morphology, and semantics. Version 3 also includes the Danish Dependency Treebank (version 1) and the Danish-English Parallel Dependency Treebank (version 2).
We investigate how morphological features in the form of part-of-speech tags impact parsing performance, using Arabic as our test case. The large, fine-grained tagset of the Penn Arabic Treebank (498 tags) is difficult to handle by parsers, ultimately due to data sparsity. However, ad-hoc conflations of treebank tags runs the risk of discarding potentially useful parsing information. The main contribution of this paper is to describe several automated, language-independent methods that search for the optimal feature combination to help parsing. We first identify 15 individual features from the Penn Arabic Treebank tagset. Either including or excluding these features results in 32,768 combinations, so we then apply heuristic techniques to identify the combination achieving the highest parsing performance. Our results show a statistically significant improvement of 2.86 % for vocalized text and 1.88 % for unvocalized text, compared with the baseline provided by the Bikel-Bies Arabic POS mapping (and an improvement of 2.14 % using product models for vocalized text, 1.65 % for unvocalized text), giving state-of-the-art results for Arabic constituency parsing. 1
Based on research linking depressive symptoms and intimate partner aggression perpetration with negatively biased perception of social stimuli, the present authors examined biased perception of emotional expressions as a mechanism in the frequently observed relationship between depression and psychological aggression perpetration. In all, 30 university students made valence ratings (negative to positive) of emotional facial expressions and completed measures of depressive symptoms and psychological aggression perpetration. As expected, depressive symptoms were positively associated with psychological aggression perpetration in an individual's current relationship, and this relationship was mediated by ratings of negative emotional expressions. These findings suggest that negatively biased perception of emotional expressions within the context of elevated depressive symptoms may represent an early stage of information processing that leads to aggressive relationship behaviors.
BACKGROUND: Identification of discourse relations, such as causal and contrastive relations, between situations mentioned in text is an important task for biomedical text-mining. A biomedical text corpus annotated with discourse relations would be very useful for developing and evaluating methods for biomedical discourse processing. However, little effort has been made to develop such an annotated resource. RESULTS: We have developed the Biomedical Discourse Relation Bank (BioDRB), in which we have annotated explicit and implicit discourse relations in 24 open-access full-text biomedical articles from the GENIA corpus. Guidelines for the annotation were adapted from the Penn Discourse TreeBank (PDTB), which has discourse relations annotated over open-domain news articles. We introduced new conventions and modifications to the sense classification. We report reliable inter-annotator agreement of over 80% for all sub-tasks. Experiments for identifying the sense of explicit discourse connectives show the connective itself as a highly reliable indicator for coarse sense classification (accuracy 90.9% and F1 score 0.89). These results are comparable to results obtained with the same classifier on the PDTB data. With more refined sense classification, there is degradation in performance (accuracy 69.2% and F1 score 0.28), mainly due to sparsity in the data. The size of the corpus was found to be sufficient for identifying the sense of explicit connectives, with classifier performance stabilizing at about 1900 training instances. Finally, the classifier performs poorly when trained on PDTB and tested on BioDRB (accuracy 54.5% and F1 score 0.57). CONCLUSION: Our work shows that discourse relations can be reliably annotated in biomedical text. Coarse sense disambiguation of explicit connectives can be done with high reliability by using just the connective as a feature, but more refined sense classification requires either richer features or more annotated data. The poor performance of a classifier trained in the open domain and tested in the biomedical domain suggests significant differences in the semantic usage of connectives across these domains, and provides robust evidence for a biomedical sublanguage for discourse and the need to develop a specialized biomedical discourse annotated corpus. The results of our cross-domain experiments are consistent with related work on identifying connectives in BioDRB.
As the basis of the syntax analysis,BaseNP recognition is an important step in English machine translation.A method based on the maximum entropy model for BaseNP recognition is proposed in this paper.Firstly,this method uses English phrase structure characteristic and the context of the position to establish feature set,then uses frequency and average mutual information to extract effective features,which is expressed as the maximum entropy model,and finally recognition is carried out based on he maximum entropy principle.Simulation experiment is carried out based on Penn Treebank data,the accuracy and recall rate of this method are more than 90%,far higher than the traditional method,so the method is a simple,quick and efficient recognition method in English BaseNP.
The Plain Meaning Rule is often assailed on the grounds that it is unprincipled—that it substitutes for careful analysis an interpreter's ad hoc and impressionistic intuition about the meaning of legal texts. But what if judges and lawyers had the means to test their intuitions about plain meaning systematically? Then initial linguistic impressions about the meaning of a legal text might be viewed as hypotheses to be tested, rather than determinative criteria upon which to base important decisions. There exists very little legal scholarship on corpus linguistics—the study of language function and use through large, electronic linguistic databases called corpora—and the role that corpus methods might play in legal interpretation. This omission becomes more and more striking as scholars and jurists (and even the United States Supreme Court) have found themselves persuaded by corpus-based arguments. This Article argues that the plain or ordinary meaning of a given term in a given context is an empirical matter that may be quantified through corpus-based methods. These methods, when applied to questions of legal ambiguity, present significant advantages over existing empirical approaches to plain meaning and over the prevailing intuition-based interpretive approach of many courts. Because large, sophisticated linguistic corpora are widely available and easy to use, and because corpus methods offer a more principled and systematic alternative to the impressionistic interpretation of legal texts, corpus linguistics may one day revolutionize the process of legal interpretation.
We introduce dependency parsing schemata, a formal framework based on Sikkel's parsing schemata for constituency parsers, which can be used to describe, analyze, and compare dependency parsing algorithms. We use this framework to describe several well-known projective and non-projective dependency parsers, build correctness proofs, and establish formal relationships between them. We then use the framework to define new polynomial-time parsing algorithms for various mildly non-projective dependency formalisms, including well-nested structures with their gap degree bounded by a constant k in time O(n 5+2k ), and a new class that includes all gap degree k structures present in several natural language treebanks (which we call mildly ill-nested structures for gap degree k) in time O(n 4+3k ). Finally, we illustrate how the parsing schema framework can be applied to Link Grammar, a dependency-related formalism.
No annotation guidelines concerning substandard Latin are presently available. This paper describes an annotation style of substandard Latin that supplements the method designed for standard Latin by the Perseus Latin Dependency Treebank and the Index Thomisticus Treebank. Each word of the corpus can be assigned only one morphological analysis. In our system, the analysis can be either functional or formal. Functional analysis is applied when a form is language-evolutionarily deducible from the corresponding standard Latin form used in the same (semantico-)syntactic function (e.g. solidus pro solidos 'gold coins' as a direct object: analysis "accusative"). Formal analysis applies when no connection to the functionally required classical form exists (e.g. heredibus pro heredes 'heirs' as a subject: analysis "ablative" or "dative"). When running queries on the corpus, the formally analysed forms can be isolated, and percentages of standard and substandard forms can be counted. In addition, further principles concerning syntax and specific morphological issues are introduced.
This paper gives two contributions to depen-dency parsing in Korean. First, we build a Ko-rean dependency Treebank from an existing constituent Treebank. For a morphologically rich language like Korean, dependency pars-ing shows some advantages over constituent parsing. Since there is not much training data available, we automatically generate depen-dency trees by applying head-percolation rules and heuristics to the constituent trees. Second, we show how to extract useful features for dependency parsing from rich morphology in Korean. Once we build the dependency Tree-bank, any statistical parsing approach can be applied. The challenging part is how to ex-tract features from tokens consisting of multi-ple morphemes. We suggest a way of select-ing important morphemes and use only these as features to avoid sparsity. Our parsing ap-proach is evaluated on three different genres using both gold-standard and automatic mor-phological analysis. We also test the impact of fine vs. coarse-grained morphologies on de-pendency parsing. With automatic morpho-logical analysis, we achieve labeled attach-ment scores of 80%+. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that Korean dependency parsing has been evaluated on la-beled edges with such a large variety of data. 1
Pain catastrophizing is associated with enhanced temporal summation of pain (TS-Pain). However, because prior studies have found that pain catastrophizing is not associated with a measure of spinal nociception (nociceptive flexion reflex [NFR] threshold), this association may not result from changes in spinal nociceptive processes. The goal of the present study in healthy participants was to examine the relationship between trait (traditional) and state (situation-specific) pain catastrophizing and temporal summation of NFR (TS-NFR) and TS-Pain. A secondary goal was to replicate prior findings concerning relationships between catastrophizing and NFR threshold, electrocutaneous pain threshold, and sensory and affective ratings of electrocutaneous stimuli. All analyses controlled for depression symptoms, pain-related anxiety, and participant sex. As expected, multiple regression analyses indicated that neither trait nor situation-specific catastrophizing was associated with NFR threshold, but that situation-specific catastrophizing was associated with pain ratings. Multilevel linear growth models of TS data indicated that situation-specific catastrophizing was associated with TS-Pain but not TS-NFR. Trait catastrophizing was not related to TS-Pain or TS-NFR. Together, these results confirm prior studies that indicate that catastrophizing enhances pain via supraspinal processes rather than spinal processes. Moreover, because catastrophizing was associated with TS-Pain but not TS-NFR, caution is warranted when using pain ratings to infer temporal summation of spinal nociceptive processes.
We develop an open-source large-scale finitestate morphological processing toolkit (AraComLex) for Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) distributed under the GPLv3 license. The morphological transducer is based on a lexical database specifically constructed for this purpose. In contrast to previous resources, the database is tuned to MSA, eliminating lexical entries no longer attested in contemporary use. The database is built using a corpus of 1,089,111,204 words, a pre-annotation tool, machine learning techniques, and knowledge-based pattern matching to automatically acquire lexical knowledge. Our morphological transducer is evaluated and compared to LDC's SAMA (Standard Arabic Morphological Analyser).
m, 3abid_khan1961@y ahoo.com Abstract-- This paper is about the development of Pashto Treebank in the form of Extensible Markup Language (XML) code. A Chart Parser has been developed that uses Chart Parsing Algorithm (1) for building parse trees for Pashto sentences. The output of the parser is the parsed text which can be obtained in one of its three forms such as reduced graph, parse tree and XML code. For parsing, the parser needs Context Free Grammar (CFG) of Pashto language and Tagged Input Text as input. The system has been tested on real world text taken from Pashto novels and web sites and tagged manually. Eighty seven (87) sentences were parsed by the parser in which fifty four (54) were correctly parsed with a single parse tree and the rest 33 were parsed with multiple trees and thus the accuracy obtained is 62.06%.
Deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the subthalamic nucleus (STN) can induce nonmotor side effects such as behavioral and mood disturbances or body weight gain in Parkinson's disease (PD) patients. We hypothesized that some of these problems could be related to an altered attribution of incentive salience (ie, emotional relevance) to rewarding and aversive stimuli. Twenty PD patients (all men; mean age ± SD, 58.3 ± 6 years) in bilateral STN DBS switched ON and OFF conditions and 18 matched controls rated pictures selected from the International Affective Picture System according to emotional valence (unpleasantness/pleasantness) and arousal on 2 independent visual scales ranging from 1 to 9. Eighty-four pictures depicting primary rewarding (erotica and food) and aversive fearful (victims and threat) and neutral stimuli were selected for this study. In the STN DBS ON condition, the PD patients attributed lower valence scores to the aversive pictures compared with the OFF condition (P <.01) and compared with controls (P <.01). The difference between the OFF condition and controls was less pronounced (P <.05). Furthermore, postoperative weight gain correlated with arousal ratings from the food pictures in the STN DBS ON condition (P <.05 compensated for OFF condition). Our results suggest that STN DBS increases activation of the aversive motivational system so that more relevance is attributed to aversive fearful stimuli. In addition, STN DBS-related sensitivity to food reward stimuli cues might drive DBS-treated patients to higher food intake and subsequent weight gain.
This paper gives a description of an annotation scheme for annotating a corpus of computer-mediated communication in Hindi (CO3H) with certain semantic, pragmatic and situational features. The annotation scheme is based on the theory of register analysis, where it is assumed that a registeral difference entails difference in certain linguistic features. It adapts and integrates the annotation schemes of sense annotation in the Penn Discourse Treebank and dialogue act annotation of DIT++ within this larger registeral framework. The situational and linguistic features that will be used to annotate the corpus for PoRT is described in the paper, along with some proposed labels for these features.
This preliminary study explored whether neurophysiological responses to visual stimuli, including attachment-related pictures, differed based on attachment status. Along with self-reported valence ratings and reaction times, recorded electroencephalographic (EEG) responses to a total of 100 images, 25 each of Positive, Negative, Neutral, and Personal (each participant's parents and child), were analyzed within and among three mothers with three attachment statuses (Dismissing, Preoccupied, and Secure), as judged by the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI). All three mothers gave their highest pleasantness ratings for Personal photographs. However, differences emerged when cross-region Alpha2 activation patterns in response to each picture type were compared amongst attachment categories. Alpha2 activation recorded during viewing of the participants' children's photographs was similar to viewing Negative pictures for mothers with insecure (Dismissing and Preoccupied) status; whereas the Alpha2 activation of the mother with Secure status towards photographs of her child was similar to Positive pictures. Different patterns of hemispheric asymmetry in Beta1 frequency when processing different picture types were also found. The mother with Dismissing status showed significantly stronger left-hemisphere Beta1 activation across all image types. The Preoccupied mother showed significantly stronger right-hemisphere Beta1 activation for all but the Neutral images, during which activation did not differ between the two hemispheres. The mother with Secure status showed significantly stronger Beta1 activation in the left hemisphere for all but parental Personal photos, during which activation did not differ between the two hemispheres. Implications from the current findings and future research possibilities are discussed.
This article deals with a processing of pronouns in the Pralex lexical database. Pronouns can be homonymous with other word types, e.g. with nouns or adverbs. Grammatical data for polysemic pronouns are introduced at the level of a full entry or at the level of individual meanings. Within every lexical unit, the author records a pronoun type as well as its primary syntactic function. Sometimes, identification of a word type can be problematic, e.g. the pronouns který (who) and jaký (which), which are used to link a subordinate clause, but have no relative function at all. When defining an explanation of a meaning, we rely on Dictionary of the Standard Czech Language and Dictionary of Standard Czech for Schools and the General Public. An example part of entries is divided in the so-called modified and sentential records.