Papers reviewed and determined not to be word norm studies. Use the flag icon to report errors or suggest re-inclusion.
18265 papers
It has been shown that the human genome contains extensive copy number variations (CNVs). Investigating the medical and evolutionary impacts of CNVs requires the knowledge of locations, sizes and frequency distribution of them within and between populations. However, CNV study of Chinese minorities, which harbor the majority of genetic diversity of Chinese populations, has been underrepresented considering the same efforts in other populations. Here we constructed, to our knowledge, a first CNV map in seven Chinese populations representing the major linguistic groups in China with 1,440 CNV regions identified using Affymetrix SNP 6.0 Array. Considerable differences in distributions of CNV regions between populations and substantial population structures were observed. We showed that ∼35% of CNV regions identified in minority ethnic groups are not shared by Han Chinese population, indicating that the contribution of the minorities to genetic architecture of Chinese population could not)
In contrast to quantity processing, up to date, the nature of ordinality has received little attention from researchers despite the fact that both quantity and ordinality are embodied in numerical information. Here we ask if there are two separate core systems that lie at the foundations of numerical cognition: (1) the traditionally and well accepted numerical magnitude system but also (2) core system for representing ordinal information. We report two novel experiments of ordinal processing that explored the relation between ordinal and numerical information processing in typically developing adults and adults with developmental dyscalculia (DD). Participants made "ordered" or "non-ordered" judgments about 3 groups of dots (non-symbolic numerical stimuli; in Experiment 1) and 3 numbers (symbolic task: Experiment 2). In contrast to previous findings and arguments about quantity deficit in DD participants, when quantity and ordinality are dissociated (as in the current tasks), DD parti)
Although number words are common in everyday speech, learning their meanings is an arduous, drawn-out process for most children, and the source of this delay has long been the subject of inquiry. Children begin by identifying the few small numerosities that can be named without counting, and this has prompted further debate over whether there is a specific, capacity-limited system for representing these small sets, or whether smaller and larger sets are both represented by the same system. Here we present a formal, computational analysis of number learning that offers a possible solution to both puzzles. This analysis indicates that once the environment and the representational demands of the task of learning to identify sets are taken into consideration, a continuous system for learning, representing and discriminating set-sizes can give rise to effective discontinuities in processing. At the same time, our simulations illustrate how typical prenominal linguistic constructions (''the)
The human population history in Southeast Asia was shaped by numerous migrations and population expansions. Their reconstruction based on archaeological, linguistic or human genetic data is often hampered by the limited number of informative polymorphisms in classical human genetic markers, such as the hypervariable regions of the mitochondrial DNA. Here, we analyse housekeeping gene sequences of the human stomach bacterium Helicobacter pylori from various countries in Southeast Asia and we provide evidence that H. pylori accompanied at least three ancient human migrations into this area: i) a migration from India introducing hpEurope bacteria into Thailand, Cambodia and Malaysia; ii) a migration of the ancestors of Austro-Asiatic speaking people into Vietnam and Cambodia carrying hspEAsia bacteria; and iii) a migration of the ancestors of the Thai people from Southern China into Thailand carrying H. pylori of population hpAsia2. Moreover, the H. pylori sequences reflect iv) the migra)
We measured perceived depth from the optic flow (a) when showing a stationary physical or virtual object to observers who moved their head at a normal or slower speed, and (b) when simulating the same optic flow on a computer and presenting it to stationary observers. Our results show that perceived surface slant is systematically distorted, for both the active and the passive viewing of physical or virtual surfaces. These distortions are modulated by head translation speed, with perceived slant increasing directly with the local velocity gradient of the optic flow. This empirical result allows us to determine the relative merits of two alternative approaches aimed at explaining perceived surface slant in active vision: an ''inverse optics'' model that takes head motion information into account, and a probabilistic model that ignores extra-retinal signals. We compare these two approaches within the framework of the Bayesian theory. The ''inverse optics'' Bayesian model produces veridi)
Exogenous neurotrophin delivery to the deaf cochlea can prevent deafness-induced auditory neuron degeneration, however, we have previously reported that these survival effects are rapidly lost if the treatment stops. In addition, there are concerns that current experimental techniques are not safe enough to be used clinically. Therefore, for such treatments to be clinically transferable, methods of neurotrophin treatment that are safe, biocompatible and can support long-term auditory neuron survival are necessary. Cell transplantation and gene transfer, combined with encapsulation technologies, have the potential to address these issues. This study investigated the survival-promoting effects of encapsulated BDNF over-expressing Schwann cells on auditory neurons in the deaf guinea pig. In comparison to control (empty) capsules, there was significantly greater auditory neuron survival following the cell-based BDNF treatment. Concurrent use of a cochlear implant is expected to result in )
This paper deals with the ways in which minority students in the Danish public school system bring mono-lingually based norms into their poly-lingual peer group interaction. In sequential micro-analyses of interaction we show how the students use the voice of an authority in their reproduction and negotiation of linguistic norms. We base our analyses on the Bakhtinian concept of double-voicing, the Goffmanian concept of keying and Tholander's concept of subteaching. We discuss in detail the relation between the local practices of the students and the linguistic norms expressed in broader society, for instance in newspaper editorials and government papers. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)
Reviews the book, A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution by Dennis Baron (2009). This book addresses the impact of digital technologies on reading and writing practices by contextualizing these developments within the communication technologies that have preceded them. Though computers are often blamed for a perceived deterioration of culture and language, Baron notes that scorn and mistrust of communication technologies is not a new phenomenon; in fact, writing, the printing press, and the telegraph were all greeted at first with skepticism. And despite the pervasive anxiety that 'internet speech' is resulting in the destruction of grammar and spelling, Baron observes that online communities enforce their own linguistic norms. Rather than a linguistic free-for-all, Baron argues, 'spelling counts' in virtual spaces just as it does offline. In sum, Baron accounts for both the benefits and pitfalls of the digital revolution and analyzes it as merely another set of technological innovations, usefully situating them within a history of writing technologies. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)
Emotional stimuli have evolutionary significance for the survival of organisms; therefore, they are attention-grabbing and are processed preferentially. The neural underpinnings of two principle emotional dimensions in affective space, valence (degree of pleasantness) and arousal (intensity of evoked emotion), have been shown to be dissociable in the olfactory, gustatory and memory systems. However, the separable roles of valence and arousal in scene perception are poorly understood. In this study, we asked how these two emotional dimensions modulate overt visual attention. Twenty-two healthy volunteers freely viewed images from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS) that were graded for affective levels of valence and arousal (high, medium, and low). Subjects' heads were immobilized and eye movements were recorded by camera to track overt shifts of visual attention. Algebraic graph-based approaches were introduced to model scan paths as weighted undirected path graphs, generating global topology metrics that characterize the algebraic connectivity of scan paths. Our data suggest that human subjects show different scanning patterns to stimuli with different affective ratings. Valence salient stimuli (with neutral arousal) elicited faster and larger shifts of attention, while arousal salient stimuli (with neutral valence) elicited local scanning, dense attention allocation and deep processing. Furthermore, our model revealed that the modulatory effect of valence was linearly related to the valence level, whereas the relation between the modulatory effect and the level of arousal was nonlinear. Hence, visual attention seems to be modulated by mechanisms that are separate for valence and arousal.
WÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊË Second,Williamsis an obviouslyintelligent andwell-read poet, and his learning findsits proper placeinhispoems,sometimes centrally asinthe poem"Marina," mentioned above.Thatsaid,attimes the musty smelloftheacademy canbe detected and be a little off-putting. Whenone poemencounters cows, thespeakermust(ofcourse)think ofIo;whenanother poemdescribes an encounter betweena man and womanon themetro, thespeaker must(ofcourse)recall Gombrowicz foran idea as simpleas physical assertion. Thereare multiple other examples oftimes whenthisreader wishestheauthor wouldputaside hisprofessor's cap. Third, there are too many stretches, even whole poems, in whichthepoet managesto barely includeconcreteimagery.For example, consider theselinesfrom "AllButAlways": "andifyouwere unable to give / an unqualified response to thesequestions, / but were forcedto admitthatyou / couldn't saywithcertainty whether / theactivities of thethingwere yourdoing/ ortheresult ofsome other agency." Suchlongstrings of abstractions seem less like poetry and moreliketherushedhurtle of abstract cogitation bysomeone consuming toomuchespresso. FredDings University ofSouthCarolina Miscellaneous Beyond Words:Translatingthe World. Susan Ouriou, ed. Banff, Alberta. BanffCentre Press. 2010. 175 pages. Can$21.95. isbn 978-1-894773-38-6 BeyondWords:Translating theWorld is a collection oftwenty-one short, mostlyinformal essays,thoughts on translation bya kaleidoscope of translators who have participated at varioustimesin theBanff literary Translation Centre's Summer ResidenceProgram. It is stimulating to confront in a shortspace how twenty-one translators with different approachesand attitudes facetwenty-one different problems oftranslation in as manydifferent ways.How does translating make us think aboutlanguage? Whatcan translators do, caughtin thegaps between twolanguages? How does each individualtextdetermine its translation? Whatabouttranslating from a major language into anindigenouslanguage?Whatis involved intranslating from a minor national language into a major one?What ifa translator isalsoa writer? Howdoes one carryacrossstylistic and linguistic norms from onelanguageto another - eveninthecaseofclosely related languages? How canpoetry be translated? Is translation political?Shoulditbe subjective? Is the translator translating him-or herself?Whataboutliterary imports? ■Hli^^H^H^^HHIII^^^MH^^HHH^^MI^^HHIJ^H ^^^^^HpHBBWBBBBBBBIBBBBBW^BMBBWBHBWpi^BjMIM^M^^^^^fe^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^B^^ What about translationin a bilingual country? How does translation relatetotheory? That all these questions are raised cogently and in briefformin thisbook reveals to the reader the multilayered complexitythatevery translation involves.Especiallyinterestingforthistranslator is theessay "Literary Translation intotheIndigenous Languages of theAmericas," by Enrique ServínHerrera,investigatingproblemsraisedbytherecent "renaissanceofaboriginallanguages as literarymedia of expression," whichcreatesa "realcultural chasm" when a moderncultureis translated intothe conceptsof an archaicculture,leading the translator to "performactsofsocialintervention, thus transcendingthe mere functionof whatwe call translation." "We must remember," theauthorwrites,"that languages are not parallel systems ofsignsthat'reflect' theworld,[but] rather independent - oratleastlargelyindependent - systems ofinterpretationoftheworld." Edith Grossmanwritesthat in translating Cervantes's DonQuixote, "I believethatmyprimary obligation as a literary translator is to re-create for thereaderin Englishthe experience of thereaderin Spanish.... When Cervantes wroteDon Quixote, hislanguage was notarchaicor quaint.He wroteina crackling, up-to-date Spanish thatwas an intrinsic partof his time,... a modernlanguagethat both reflected andhelpedtoshapetheway peopleexperienced theworld." For those who believe translationis simple,FrançoiseRoy offers a not atypical conundrum: "If a verse reads sus hermanos in Spanish,thetranslator intoFrenchmust know the gender of the hermanos and whetherthereis morethanone of each gender in order to decide "j EditedbySusanOuriou "j bey bySusanOuriou m -w ■ I Translating X^| JL JL theWorld ÛWO ras whetherto use sesfrères, leurs frères, sesfrères etsa sœur, sonfrère etsa sœur, sesfrères et ses sœurs,sonfrère etses sœurs,leursfrères et leursœur,leurs frères et leurssœurs,leurfrère et leur sœurorleur frère etleurssœurs." Burton Pike Graduate Center, CUNY Hispanic New York: A Sourcebook. Claudio Iván Remeseira, ed. & intro. AndrewDelbanco, foreword.NewYork. Columbia University Press.2010. xxiv+ 547 pages. $89.50 ($29.95 paper), isbn 978-0-231-14818-4(14819-1 paper) The publication of Hispanic New York:A Sourcebook by Claudio Ivan Remeseira, founder and director of the Hispanic New York Project in the American Studies Program at Columbia University, marks a significantmilestone in Nueva York studies as an interdisciplinary,multinationalfieldwithhemispheric and transatlantic scope. The twenty-five textsanthologized infoursections(HistoricalPerspectives;Race, Ethnicity, and Religion; Language and Literature; Music and Art) represent numerousintersectingsocialscienceand humanities disciplines:demographics, literature, journalism,women's studies, sociology, religion,dialectology,musicology, and art history.Although thisselectionof readingscould not possibly cover, uniformly,every nationalgroup or scholarlyissue of HispanicNew York,thebreadthand depth of the classifiedbibliography helps compensateforany perceived omissionofcoverage.Extensivesubject and name indexes also provide access to thevast rangeoftopicsin thereadings,and thecoverillustration...
Introduction Maternal anxiety during pregnancy can have many effects on the outcome of the pregnancy such as gestational length, birthweight, prenatal attachment, prepartum and intrapartum complications. Objectives Three categories of pictures were presented to 149 pregnant women: 1. baby pictures as cues of prenatal attachment; 2. couples in erotic and family situations as cues of relationship to the partner; 3. other pictures related to pregnancy (such as the physical changes of the body, experiencing social support) as cues of potential fears and coping with stressful situations. Aims The aim of our study is to describe the relation between pregnant women's ratings to affective stimuli and their level of anxiety. Methods Affective ratings have been assessed on three dimensions: valence (ranging from pleasant to unpleasant), arousal (ranging from calm to excited), and dominance/control (ranging from being overwhelmed by emotions to controling an affective state). Anxiety has been measured with HADS. Results Women with high level of anxiety have rated the pregnancy related pictures less pleasant, less arousing but more overwhelming (lower level of control over an emotional state). Women with low level of anxiety have rated the pictures more pleasant, less arousing and less overwhelming (higher level of perceived control an emotional state). Conclusions High level of anxiety has correlated with special pattern of emotional reactions to pregnancy related pictures from the IAPS.
Attitudes toward human germline engineering were assessed across three studies. In Pilot Study One, we evaluated participant familiarity ratings for a preliminary item pool consisting of potential targets of germline modification in order to screen out unfamiliar targets. The results were used to screen out 54 of 170 items. In Pilot Study Two, we used participant representativeness ratings to validate categorizations for the remaining items by removing items that were indifferently representative of specific goals (therapeutic or enhancing) and types (physical, cognitive, or personality) of germline modifications. The results also indicated that for many items, the distinction between cognitive and personality characteristics broke down, leading us to collapse these categories into a new type category based on general psychological traits. In Study One, we compared mean approval ratings for potential targets of germline engineering sorted according to the goal of modification (therapeutic or enhancing) and the type of characteristic being targeted (physical or psychological). The results indicated that approval was higher for therapeutic modifications than for enhancing modifications, and higher for modifications targeting physical traits than for those targeting psychological traits. A regression analysis showed that approval correlated positively with knowledge, Big Five Agreeableness, and negatively with perceived risk and female gender. Contrary to expectations, approval did not correlate with psychological essentialism or Big Five Openness. Implications and limitations are discussed.
BACKGROUND: Major depressive disorder (MDD) is associated with deficits in recalling specific autobiographical memories (AMs). Extensive research has examined the functional anatomical correlates of AM in healthy humans, but no studies have examined the neurophysiological underpinnings of AM deficits in MDD. The goal of the present study was to examine the differences in the hemodynamic response between patients with MDD and controls while they engage in AM recall. METHOD: Participants (12 unmedicated MDD patients; 14 controls) underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanning while recalling AMs in response to positive, negative and neutral cue words. The hemodynamic response during memory recall versus performing subtraction problems was compared between MDD patients and controls. Additionally, a parametric linear analysis examined which regions correlated with increasing arousal ratings. RESULTS: Behavioral results showed that relative to controls, the patients with MDD had fewer specific (p=0.013), positive (p=0.030), highly arousing (p=0.036) and recent (p=0.020) AMs, and more categorical (p<0.001) AMs. The blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) response in the parahippocampus and hippocampus was higher for memory recall versus subtraction in controls and lower in those with MDD. Activity in the anterior insula was lower for specific AM recall versus subtraction, with the magnitude of the decrement greater in MDD patients. Activity in the anterior cingulate cortex was positively correlated with arousal ratings in controls but not in patients with MDD. CONCLUSIONS: We replicated previous findings of fewer specific and more categorical AMs in patients with MDD versus controls. We found differential activity in medial temporal and prefrontal lobe structures involved in AM retrieval between MDD patients and controls as they engaged in AM recall. These neurophysiological deficits may underlie AM recall impairments seen in MDD.
Facial expressions frequently involve multiple individual facial actions. How do facial actions combine to create emotionally meaningful expressions? Infants produce positive and negative facial expressions at a range of intensities. It may be that a given facial action can index the intensity of both positive (smiles) and negative (cry-face) expressions. Objective, automated measurements of facial action intensity were paired with continuous ratings of emotional valence to investigate this possibility. Degree of eye constriction (the Duchenne marker) and mouth opening were each uniquely associated with smile intensity and, independently, with cry-face intensity. In addition, degree of eye constriction and mouth opening were each unique predictors of emotion valence ratings. Eye constriction and mouth opening index the intensity of both positive and negative infant facial expressions, suggesting parsimony in the early communication of emotion.
How does expertise influence the perception of representational and abstract paintings? We asked 20 experts on art history and 20 laypersons to explore and evaluate a series of paintings ranging in style from representational to abstract in five categories. We compared subjective esthetic judgments and emotional evaluations, gaze patterns, and electrodermal reactivity between the two groups of participants. The level of abstraction affected esthetic judgments and emotional valence ratings of the laypersons but had no effect on the opinions of the experts: the laypersons' esthetic and emotional ratings were highest for representational paintings and lowest for abstract paintings, whereas the opinions of the experts were independent of the abstraction level. The gaze patterns of both groups changed as the level of abstraction increased: the number of fixations and the length of the scanpaths increased while the duration of the fixations decreased. The viewing strategies - reflected in the target, location, and path of the fixations - however indicated that experts and laypersons paid attention to different aspects of the paintings. The electrodermal reactivity did not vary according to the level of abstraction in either group but expertise was reflected in weaker responses, compared with laypersons, to information received about the paintings.
Abstract When unknown groups and equal status groups are compared by contrasting one group (“the effect to be explained”) against another (“the linguistic norm”), the group positioned as the norm is sometimes perceived as more powerful, more agentic, and as less communal. Such perceptions may contribute to status‐linked stereotypes, as group differences are spontaneously described by positioning higher‐status groups as the linguistic norm. Here, 103 participants considered gender differences in status to be larger and more legitimate and applied gender stereotypes more readily upon reading about gender differences in leadership that were framed around a male rather than a female linguistic norm. These effects did not generalize to 113 participants who read about gender differences in leisure time preferences framed around either norm. Jointly, these results suggest that the effects of linguistic framing on perceived group status and power and on group stereotypes generalize to domains where there are real differences in status, and contexts in which higher‐status groups are the default standard for comparison. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
We examined emotional responding to music after mood induction. On each trial, listeners heard a 30-s music excerpt and rated how much they liked it, whether it sounded happy or sad, and how familiar it was. When the excerpts sounded unambiguously happy or sad (Experiment 1), the typical preference for happy-sounding music was eliminated after inducing a sad mood. When the excerpts sounded ambiguous with respect to happiness and sadness (Experiment 2), listeners perceived more sadness after inducing a sad mood. Sad moods had no influence on familiarity ratings (Experiments 1 and 2). These findings imply that "misery loves company." Listeners in a sad mood fail to show the typical preference for happy-sounding music, and they perceive more sadness in music that is ambiguous with respect to mood.
Affective evaluations of previously ignored visual stimuli are more negative than those of novel items or prior targets of attention or response. This has been taken as evidence that inhibition has negative affective consequences. But inhibition could act instead to attenuate or "neutralize" preexisting affective salience, predicting opposite effects for stimuli that were initially positive or negative in valence. We tested this hypothesis by presenting trustworthy and untrustworthy faces (Experiment 1), strongly positive and negative photographs (Experiment 2), and monetary gain- and loss-associated patterns (Experiment 3) in a Go/No-Go task and assessing subsequent affective ratings. Evaluations of prior No-Go (inhibited) stimuli were more negative than of prior Go (noninhibited) stimuli, regardless of a priori affective valence. Ratings of No-Go stimuli also became increasingly negative (vs. increasingly neutral) when preexisting salience was increased via stimulus repetition (Experiment 4). Our results suggest inhibition leads to affective devaluation, not affective neutralization.
In this paper we present the development process of NLP-QT, a question treebank that will be used for data-driven parsing in the context of a domain-specific QA system for querying NLP resource metadata. We motivate the need to build NLP-QT as a resource in its own right, by comparing the Penn Treebank-style annotation scheme used for QuestionBank (Judge et al., 2006) with the modified NP annotation for the Penn Treebank introduced by Vadas and Curran (2007). We argue that this modified annotation scheme provides a better interface representation for semantic interpretation and show how it can be incorporated into the NLP-QT resource, without significant loss in parser performance. The parsing experiments reported in the paper confirm the feasibility of an iterative, semi-automatic construction of the NLP-QT resource similar to the approach taken for QuestionBank. At the same time, we propose to improve the iterative refinement technique used for QuestionBank by adopting Hwa (2001)’s heuristics for selecting additional material to be handcorrected and added to the data set at each iteration.
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.
Annotated corpora are essential for almost all NLP applications. Whereas they are expected to be of a very high quality because of their importance for the followup developments, they still contain a considerable number of errors. With this work we want to draw attention to this fact. Additionally, we try to estimate the amount of errors and propose a method for their automatic correction. Whereas our approach is able to find only a portion of the errors that we suppose are contained in almost any annotated corpus due to the nature of the process of its creation, it has a very high precision, and thus is in any case beneficial for the quality of the corpus it is applied to. At last, we compare it to a different method for error detection in treebanks and find out that the errors that we are able to detect are mostly different and that our approaches are complementary. 1
The paper describes the basic strategies behind the word and semantic level alignment in the Bulgarian-English treebank. The word level alignment has taken into consideration the experience within other NLP groups in the context of the Bulgarian language specific features. The semantic level alignment builds on the word level alignment and is represented in the framework of the Minimal Recursion Semantics. 1
Patrick Hanks probably no longer needs any introduction to lexicographers and lexicologists, and especially not to readers of the International Journal of Lexicography. He has published at least one article or book review every year in IJL since 2004 and his regular contributions to Euralex conferences and to many other journals provide clear evidence that this prolific author cannot be ignored as soon as one discusses modern lexicography. This brief book review will not attempt to describe the multiple facets of Hanks's contributions to lexicography, lexical semantics, computational and corpus linguistics, and the study of word meaning in general. I encourage the reader to read Gilles-Maurice de Schryver's excellent introduction to the Festschrift he edited in honour of his friend on the occasion of his 70th birthday. De Schryver rightly points out that ‘Hanks is a linguistic theorist and empirical corpus analyst, also an onomastician, but above all he is a lexicographer’ (p.4). For linguists who, like me, have always taken a lot of pleasure in reading Hanks's papers on phraseology, on idioms, on metaphors, on word associations, on collocations and collocation extraction, on dictionary definitions, on corpus pattern analysis, on linguistic norms and exploitations, or on proper names, it may be too easy to forget that he is primarily a lexicographer, indeed, and that he has played a pivotal role in several major dictionaries of the English language, including the Collins Dictionary of the English language (1979), the Collins COBUILD English Language Dictionary (1987) and the New Oxford Dictionary of English (1998). Beyond these direct contributions to lexicography, it is safe to claim that if today's dictionaries, especially learners’ dictionaries, are better at presenting collocational material and phraseological data, it is largely due to the fact that, in 1989, Patrick Hanks showed us how to discover the most significant collocates in a seminal and influential paper he wrote with Ken Church (Church and Hanks 1989).
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
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.
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.
OBJECTIVES: Dental phobia is currently classified as a specific phobia of the blood-injection-injury (BII) subtype. In another subtype, animal phobia, enhanced amplitudes of late event-related potentials have consistently been identified for patients during passive viewing of disorder-relevant pictures. However, this has not been shown for BII phobics, and studies with dental phobics are lacking. Findings on cardiac responses in BII phobia during exposure are heterogeneous, as some studies showed a diphasic pattern of heart rate acceleration and deceleration, whereas others observed pure acceleration. In contrast, heart rate increase has consistently been shown for dental phobics, resembling the reaction of animal phobics. Moreover, the BII subtype is characterized by elevated disgust reactivity whereas the role of habitual disgust proneness in dental phobia is unclear. METHODS: We recorded the electroencephalogram and the electrocardiogram from 18 dental phobic and 18 healthy women while they watched pictures depicting dental treatment, disgust, fear and neutral items. RESULTS: Phobics relative to controls showed an enhanced late positive potential (300-700 ms) and heart rate acceleration towards phobic material, reflecting motivated attention and fear. Affective ratings revealed that dental phobics experienced significantly higher levels of fear than disgust during exposure to phobia-relevant material. Patients' elevated habitual disgust proneness was restricted to specific domains, such as the oral incorporation of offensive objects. CONCLUSION: The psychophysiology of dental phobia resembles the fear-dominated subtypes of specific phobia reported in earlier studies. Future studies should continue to investigate whether the current classification of this disorder as BII phobia needs to be reconsidered.
Ingarden's phenomenological study of consciousness in the reading process sheds light on Wolfgang Iser's study of the reading activity,hence the latter's theory of aesthetic response,a branch of reception aesthetics.Iser's theory is at the juncture of phenomenology,reception theory and modern arts,highlighting the interaction in reading.It mainly contains two parts: description of the reading activity,or reading phenomenology,and his elaboration of the structure of literary texts.The former can be summarized as that the work is generated mutually between the reader and the text,with the reader shaped by reading experiences.This opinion cannot be found in Jauss.Iser argues that vacancy and negation in the text offer a special structure controlling the interaction in question.Negation means the discarding of familiar social norms,and is one of the reasons for vacancy,which,in turn,is the potential relationship in the text.Though Iser's theory is considered by some as lexically difficult and contradictory,it is still a supplement to Ingarden's phenomenology and therefore deserves recognition.
Many recent experiments in the automatic classification of discourse relations have limited themselves to a small set of coarse categories. While there are eminent reasons to do so – annotation for a small sets of categories can be created more reliably, and possibly also be defined in a more clear – cut way than finer distinctions – it is an interesting question whether the finer-grained distinctions present in some annotated corpora can be reconstructed reliably. The present paper investigates the feasibility of such fine-grained tagging of discourse relations using data from the Penn Discourse Treebank. 1
This paper presents a probabilistic approach for POS tagging that combines HMMs and character language models being applied to Portuguese texts. In this approach, the emission probabilities for each hidden state in a HMM are estimated by a proper character language model. The tagger built has been trained and tested on Bosque, a subset of Floresta Sinta(c)tica treebank, reaching 96.2% accuracy with a 39-tag tagset and 92.0% with a 257-tag tagset extended with inflexion information.
OBJECTIVE: To determine the effectiveness of a modulated acoustic startle reflex paradigm with emotional imagery in studying physiological changes associated with emotional responses in persons with traumatic brain injury (TBI). SETTING: Outpatient rehabilitation hospital. PARTICIPANTS: Six individuals with moderate to severe TBI. Mean age was 32 years and mean years postinjury were 9.9. METHOD: The modulated acoustic startle reflex procedure involved imagery of emotional scripts (joy, anger, fear, and neutral) followed by a startle noise, versus startle noise alone (no script). MEASURES: Eyeblink and skin conductance response, subjective arousal and valence ratings of the scripts, and general anger questionnaire. RESULTS: Startle blink responses following anger imagery were significantly smaller than those following fear (P =.006) and neutral (P =.023) imagery. Skin conductance response did not change significantly based on the content of the scripts (P =.070). CONCLUSIONS: Large startle blink responses indicate avoidance of a stimulus. Our findings suggest that participants with TBI did not have an avoidant reaction to anger-inducing stimuli. Skin conductance response findings may imply arousal impairments. The modulated acoustic startle reflex was effective in measuring emotional responses; however, larger studies comparing persons with TBI with control groups are needed to further explore these findings.
The conventional sequence labeling methods for Chinese word segmentation do not fully utilize the linguistic information, which restricts further improvements of the performance. Chinese morphology intensively investigates the constructions and usages of Chinese words, which is helpful to Chinese word segmentation. Furthermore, some word segmentation ambiguities cannot be resolved only by means of the lexical information, and the final disambiguations take place in the parsing process. In this paper, we propose a parsing-based Chinese word segmentation model, which can fully utilize the morphological and syntactic information. Experiments on Penn Chinese Treebank(CTB) 5.0 show that the proposed model obtains competitive performances as the CRFs-based model. To investigate the relationship between our parsing-based model and the CRFs-based model, a maximum entropy model based framework for integrating different knowledge sources is employed. The integrating model obtains an F-measure of 97.9, 25% in segmentation error rate reduction relative to the CRFs-based model, which indicates that the two models are complementary to each other.
L’exploitation de corpus analyses syntaxiquement (ou corpus arbores) pour le public non specialiste n’est pas un probleme trivial. Si la communaute du TAL souhaite mettre a la disposition des chercheurs non-informaticiens des corpus comportant des annotations linguistiques complexes, elle doit imperativement developper des interfaces simples a manipuler mais permettant des recherches fines. Dans cette communication, nous presentons les modes de recherche « grand public » developpe(e)s dans le cadre du projet Scientext, qui met a disposition un corpus d’ecrits scientifiques interrogeable par partie textuelle, par partie du discours et par fonction syntaxique. Les modes simples sont decrits: un mode libre et guide, ou l’utilisateur selectionne lui-meme les elements de la requete, et un mode semantique, qui comporte des grammaires locales preetablies a l’aide des fonctions syntaxiques.
PURPOSE: To report how youths, both with and without idiopathic scoliosis (IS), respond to questions about their self-image and perceptions of body shape. An additional purpose is to describe themes that emerged as important to youths with IS to better understand scoliosis from their perspective. METHODS: Descriptive qualitative and quantitative methods were utilized. Subject interviews were conducted, as part of a larger cognitive interviewing study on the Spinal Appearance Questionnaire, using a cross-sectional sample of 76 females between 8 and 16 years of age with IS and who were typically developing (TD), without scoliosis. RESULTS: IS and TD subjects revealed similar findings when asked what makes them look good versus their peers; self-image ratings were also positive. Predominant themes from open-ended responses include physical appearance, feelings, brace wear, and discomfort. CONCLUSION: Self-image and body shape did not differ significantly between groups. The identified themes warrant further exploration as they are significant and important to youth with scoliosis.
Flat noun phrase structure was, up until recently, the standard in annotation for the Penn Treebanks. With the recent addition of internal noun phrase annotation, dependency parsing and applications down the NLP pipeline are likely affected. Some machine translation systems, such as TectoMT, use deep syntax as a language transfer layer. It is proposed that changes to the noun phrase dependency parse will have a cascading effect down the NLP pipeline and in the end, improve machine translation output, even with a reduction in parser accuracy that the noun phrase structure might cause. This paper examines this noun phrase structure’s effect on dependency parsing, in English, with a maximum spanning tree parser and shows a 2.43%, 0.23 Bleu score, improvement for English to Czech machine translation. 1
AIM: To evaluate a standardised MRI acquisition protocol and a new image rating scale for disease severity in patients with progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP) and multiple systems atrophy (MSA) in a large multicentre study. METHODS: The MRI protocol consisted of two-dimensional sagittal and axial T1, axial PD, and axial and coronal T2 weighted acquisitions. The 32 item ordinal scale evaluated abnormalities within the basal ganglia and posterior fossa, blind to diagnosis. Among 760 patients in the study population (PSP = 362, MSA = 398), 627 had per protocol images (PSP = 297, MSA = 330). Intra-rater (n = 60) and inter-rater (n = 555) reliability were assessed through Cohen's statistic, and scale structure through principal component analysis (PCA) (n = 441). Internal consistency and reliability were checked. Discriminant and predictive validity of extracted factors and total scores were tested for disease severity as per clinical diagnosis. RESULTS: Intra-rater and inter-rater reliability were acceptable for 25 (78%) of the items scored (≥ 0.41). PCA revealed four meaningful clusters of covarying parameters (factor (F) F1: brainstem and cerebellum; F2: midbrain; F3: putamen; F4: other basal ganglia) with good to excellent internal consistency (Cronbach α 0.75-0.93) and moderate to excellent reliability (intraclass coefficient: F1: 0.92; F2: 0.79; F3: 0.71; F4: 0.49). The total score significantly discriminated for disease severity or diagnosis; factorial scores differentially discriminated for disease severity according to diagnosis (PSP: F1-F2; MSA: F2-F3). The total score was significantly related to survival in PSP (p<0.0007) or MSA (p<0.0005), indicating good predictive validity. CONCLUSIONS: The scale is suitable for use in the context of multicentre studies and can reliably and consistently measure MRI abnormalities in PSP and MSA. Clinical Trial Registration Number The study protocol was filed in the open clinical trial registry (http://www.clinicaltrials.gov) with ID No NCT00211224.
How to quickly locate the interested information in the XML database under a certain twig pattern is a popular research topic.To solve the problem that the TwigStack algorithm for handling the case with parent-child nodes would come out with massive intermediate results,an improved twig pattern query algorithm of cTwigStack was proposed,which was based on caching the non-leaf nodes and delaying the leaf nodes output.The experimental results on Treebank dataset indicate that the proposed algorithm can achieve the most accurate results of the queries that contain the ancestor-descendant relationships below branching nodes.Besides,compared with the present algorithm,it is also highly effective when processing parent-child relationships below branching nodes.
We consider a very simple, yet effective, approach to cross language adaptation of dependency parsers. We first remove lexical items from the treebanks and map part-of-speech tags into a common tagset. We then train a language model on tag sequences in otherwise unlabeled target data and rank labeled source data by perplexity per word of tag sequences from less similar to most similar to the target. We then train our target language parser on the most similar data points in the source labeled data. The strategy achieves much better results than a non-adapted baseline and stateof-the-art unsupervised dependency parsing, and results are comparable to more complex projection-based cross language adaptation algorithms. 1
This paper presents a method for word sense disambiguation based on Lesk algorithm which uses lexical database WordNet as knowledge base. The word sense disambiguation is the process of automatically clarifying a meaning of a word in its context. In general, ontology means the meaning or analogous term. It can be interpreted by relating the word with other words in the sentence. This tool accepts English statement as input and gives best possible meaning of given word. Method is experimented with senseval-2 test data for lexical sample task. The results show the betterment over the original Lesk algorithm.
This paper examines how W.E.B. DuBois' concept of double consciousness influenced the interactions of 13 Black youth inside an after school Community Literacy Intervention Program (CLIP). Du Bois, a pre-eminent 20th century Black sociologist, used double consciousness as a lens to help explain social and psychological tensions that African Americans encounter while negotiating their identities in a societal context structured mainly upon dominant white cultural and linguistic norms and values. The authors provide a conceptual framework for understanding the interpretive processes that signify double consciousness which includes: surveying the context; assessing risks and identity consequences; articulating mainstream or race conscious reads, and bridging/or disengaging. Implications for pre-service teachers and particularly urban educators are discussed.
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)
Syntactic structures have been good features for opinion analysis, but it is not easy to use them. To find these features by supervised learning methods, correct syntactic labels are indispensible. Two possible sources to acquire syntactic structures are parsing trees and dependency trees. For the annotation processing, parsing trees are more readable for annotators, while dependency trees are easier to use by programs. To use syntactic structures as features, this paper tried to annotate on human friendly materials and transform these annotations to the corresponding machine friendly materials. We annotated the gold answers of opinion syntactic structures on the parsing tree from Chinese Treebank, and then proposed methods to find their corresponding dependency relations on the dependency trees generated from the same sentence. With these relations, we could train a model to annotate opinion dependency relations automatically to provide an opinion dependency parser, which is language independent if language resources are incorporated. Experiment results show that the annotated syntactic structures and their corresponding dependency relations improve at least 8% of the performance of opinion analysis.
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)
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.
In some theories of sentence comprehension, linguistically relevant lexical knowledge, such as selectional restrictions, is privileged in terms of the time-course of its access and influence. We examined whether event knowledge computed by combining multiple concepts can rapidly influence language understanding even in the absence of selectional restriction violations. Specifically, we investigated whether instruments can combine with actions to influence comprehension of ensuing patients of (as in Rayner, Warren, Juhuasz, & Liversedge, 2004; Warren & McConnell, 2007). Instrument-verb-patient triplets were created in a norming study designed to tap directly into event knowledge. In self-paced reading (Experiment 1), participants were faster to read patient nouns, such as hair, when they were typical of the instrument-action pair (Donna used the shampoo to wash vs. the hose to wash). Experiment 2 showed that these results were not due to direct instrument-patient relations. Experiment 3 replicated Experiment 1 using eyetracking, with effects of event typicality observed in first fixation and gaze durations on the patient noun. This research demonstrates that conceptual event-based expectations are computed and used rapidly and dynamically during on-line language comprehension. We discuss relationships among plausibility and predictability, as well as their implications. We conclude that selectional restrictions may be best considered as event-based conceptual knowledge rather than lexical-grammatical knowledge.
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.
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.