Papers reviewed and determined not to be word norm studies. Use the flag icon to report errors or suggest re-inclusion.
18265 papers
This paper presents the PolNet-Polish WordNet project which aims at building a linguistically oriented ontology for Polish compatible with other WordNet projects such as Princeton WordNet, EuroWordNet and other similarly organized ontologies. The main idea behind this kind of ontologies is to use words related by synonymy to construct formal representations of concepts. In the paper we sketch the PolNet project methodology and implementation. We present data obtained so far, as well as the WQuery tool for querying and maintaining PolNet. WQuery is a query language that make use of data types based on synsets, word senses and various semantic relations which occur in wordnet-like lexical databases. The tool is particularly useful to deal with complex querying tasks like searching for cycles in semantic relations, finding isolated synsets or computing overall statistics. Both data and tools presented in this paper have been applied within an advanced AI system POLINT-112-SMS with emulated natural language competence, where they are used in the understanding subsystem. 1.
We present a set of experiments on dependency parsing of the Basque Dependency Treebank (BDT). The present work has examined several directions that try to explore the rich set of morphosyntactic features in the BDT: i) experimenting the impact of morphological features, ii) application of dependency tree transformations, iii) application of a two-stage parsing scheme (stacking), and iv) combinations of the individual experiments. All the tests were conducted using MaltParser (Nivre et al., 2007a), a freely available and state of the art dependency parser generator. 1
The current study investigated typical, everyday Chinese interaction online and examined what linguistic meanings arise from this form of communication – not only semantic but also, importantly, pragmatic, discursive, contextual and lexical meanings etc. In particular, it set out to ascertain whether at least some of the cultural values and norms etc. known to exist in Chinese culture, as reflected in the Chinese language, are maintained or preserved in modern Chinese e-communication. To do all this, the author collected a sample set of data from Chinese online resources found in Singapore, including a range of blog sites and MSN chat rooms where interactants have kept their identities anonymous. A radically semantic approach was adopted – namely, the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) model – to analyze meanings that arose from the data. The analyses were presented and compiled in the way of “cultural cyberscripts” – based on an NSM analytical method called “cultural scripts”. Through these cyberscripts, findings indicated that, while this form of e-communication does exhibit some departure from conventional socio-cultural values and norms, something remains linguistically and culturally Chinese that is unique to Chinese interaction online.
Proceedings of the Ninth International Workshop \non Treebanks and Linguistic Theories. \nEditors: Markus Dickinson, Kaili Müürisep and Marco Passarotti. \nNEALT Proceedings Series, Vol. 9 (2010), 187-198. \n© 2010 The editors and contributors. \nPublished by \nNorthern European Association for Language \nTechnology (NEALT) \nhttp://omilia.uio.no/nealt. \nElectronically published at \nTartu University Library (Estonia) \nhttp://hdl.handle.net/10062/15891.
Human perceptions of the “humanness” of robots have been found to be influenced by face, voice and interactivity features. These features have been studied individually in a human robot interaction (HRI) and facial features appear to be strongest in promoting positive human emotions. The objective of this study was to assess the effects of combined humanoid robot features on human emotions during a medicine delivery task. Seven robot prototypes with various combinations of face, voice and interactivity features were developed and classified in terms of levels of humanness. A “Wizard of Oz” experiment was conducted in which 32 subjects received and accepted a simulated bag of medicine from each of the robot prototypes. Both subjective (arousal and valence ratings) and physiological (HR and GSR) measures were collected as indicators of participant emotional states. Results revealed robot configurations with higher levels of humanness promoted positive emotions. Arousal and valence ratings and the HR response had utility for predicting emotions. We also found that additional humanoid features lead to higher GSR ratings, but the trend was not strictly linear with the pre-defined level of robot humanness.
The present study explored the effect of speaker prosody on the representation of words in memory. To this end, participants were presented with a series of words and asked to remember the words for a subsequent recognition test. During study, words were presented auditorily with an emotional or neutral prosody, whereas during test, words were presented visually. Recognition performance was comparable for words studied with emotional and neutral prosody. However, subsequent valence ratings indicated that study prosody changed the affective representation of words in memory. Compared to words with neutral prosody, words with sad prosody were later rated as more negative and words with happy prosody were later rated as more positive. Interestingly, the participants' ability to remember study prosody failed to predict this effect, suggesting that changes in word valence were implicit and associated with initial word processing rather than word retrieval. Taken together these results identify a mechanism by which speakers can have sustained effects on listener attitudes towards word referents.
Schloss and Palmer (VSS-2009) reported that 80% of the variance in average color preferences for 32 chromatic colors by American participants was explained by an ecological measure of how much people like the objects that are characteristically those colors. The weighted affective valence estimate (WAVE), computed from the results of a multi-task procedure, outperformed three other models containing more free parameters. One group of participants described all objects that came to mind for each color, which were compiled into 222 categories of object descriptions. A second group rated how similar each presented color was to the color of each object described for that color. A third group rated their affective valences (positive-to-negative) for each object from its verbal description. The WAVE for each color is the average valence for each object, weighted by the rated similarity of the given color to the described object. The WAVEs were strongly correlated with average color preference ratings (r=.89). We now show that when WAVEs are calculated at the level of individual participants, they account for significantly more variance in the same individual's color preference ratings than do average WAVEs computed from the entire group. A new group of participants rated their preferences for all 32 colors, after which they provided their own idiosyncratic object descriptions for each color and rated their affective responses to them. They also rated their affective response to each of the 222 object descriptions provided by the original group. The correlation between the individual's color preferences and his/her individual WAVEs, computed from their personal ratings of the 222 object valences, proved to be reliably better than the fit of the group WAVEs, computed from the average affective ratings. Together, the cone-contrast model (Hurlbert & Ling, 2007) and the WAVE predictor explain 58% of the variance in individual participants.
This research represents the first attempt to produce a working system for the automatic processing of texts of Bahasa Melayu âMalayâ. At the heart of the system is an integrated relational lexical database called MALEX, which draws on the experience of working on English and other languages, but which is specifically tailored to the conditions of Malay. The development of the database is from the beginning entirely data driven, and is based on the analysis of a corpus of naturally produced Malay texts. In designing procedures which access the database, properties of the text are consistently and rigorously distinguished from properties of the lexicon and of the grammar. The system is currently used to provide information for a range of applications, for grammatical tagging, stemming and lemmatisation, parsing, and for generating phonological representations. It is hoped and intended that the design features of MALEX will be transferable, and provide a model for the development of working systems for other Asian languages.
In this study, evaluation of direct behavior rating (DBR) occurred with regard to two primary areas: (a) accuracy of ratings with varied instrumentation (anchoring: proportional or absolute) and procedures (observation length: 5 min, 10 min, or 20 min) and (b) one-week test—retest reliability. Participants viewed video clips of a typical third grade student and then used single-item DBR scales to rate disruptive and academically engaged behavior. Overall, ratings tended to overestimate the actual occurrence of behavior. Although ratings of academic engagement were not affected by duration of the observation, ratings of disruptive behavior were, as the longer the duration, the more the ratings of disruptive behavior were overestimated. In addition, the longer the student was disruptive, the greater the overestimation effect. Results further revealed that anchoring the DBR scale as proportional versus absolute number of minutes did not affect rating accuracy. Finally, test—retest analyses revealed low to moderate consistency across time points for 10-min and 20-min observations, with increased consistency as the number of raters or number of ratings increased (e.g., four 5-min vs. one 20-min). Overall, results contribute to the technical evaluation of DBR as a behavior assessment method and provide preliminary information regarding the influence of duration of an observation period on DBR data.
A variety of query systems have been developed for interrogating parsed corpora, or treebanks. With the arrival of efficient, widecoverage parsers, it is feasible to create very large databases of trees. However, existing approaches that use in-memory search, or relational or XML database technologies, do not scale up. We describe a method for storage, indexing, and query of treebanks that uses an information retrieval engine. Several experiments with a large treebank demonstrate excellent scaling characteristics for a wide range of query types. This work facilitates the curation of much larger treebanks, and enables them to be used effectively in a variety of scientific and engineering tasks. 1
Raven’s Progressive Matrices is a widely used test for assessing intelligence and reasoning ability (Raven, Court, & Raven, 1998). Since the test is nonverbal, it can be applied to many different populations and has been used all over the world (Court & Raven, 1995). However, relatively few matrices are in the sets developed by Raven, which limits their use in experiments requiring large numbers of stimuli. For the present study, we analyzed the types of relations that appear in Raven’s original Standard Progressive Matrices (SPMs) and created a software tool that can combine the same types of relations according to parameters chosen by the experimenter, to produce very large numbers of matrix problems with specific properties. We then conducted a norming study in which the matrices we generated were compared with the actual SPMs. This study showed that the generated matrices both covered and expanded on the range of problem difficulties provided by the SPMs.
Several software programs exist to assist researchers in setting up online questionnaires. Existing tools are of little help for delivering online rating studies, for which it is often desirable to collect data from participants for only a subset of a stimulus set. OR-Vis enables researchers to quickly set up online rating studies by supplying the set of items to be rated, the number of stimuli an individual participant responds to, the number of participants an item is shown to, and the rating questions. The software then generates and delivers unique questionnaires for each participant, while managing the data collection process. The present article describes OR-Vis, its installation process, and how to use it to gather data. OR-Vis is open-source software and can be downloaded from www.orvis.uni-muenster.de.
Semantic similarity calculating has become a widespread topic in the field such as artificial intelligence, natural language processing, information retrieval and so on. WordNet is an English lexical database for synsets and relations. It is simple and effective to calculate the similarity between concepts in WordNet. Five semantic similarity methods based on WordNet are discussed in this paper. By analyzing and comparing those methods, the features of each methods are presented and experiment results are given finally.
Objective:To explore the effect of emotional faces on startle reflex in adulthood.Methods:Thirty-six normal adults were recruited through advertisements and screened out with State-Trait Anxiety Inventory and Beck Depression Inventory.Subjects were presented with acoustic startle probes,while viewing different facial stimulus(representing anger,fear,sad,happy,and neutral).Their orbicularis electromyography(EMG)activity and self-reported valence and arousal ratings were assessed.Results:Anger and fear expressions both induced greater startle reactivity than neutral expressions[(52.07±4.24),(50.92±4.87)vs.(47.41±4.49),Ps0.05],but the differences between other faces were not significant(Ps0.05).Self-reported valence and arousal ratings both revealed significant main effects(F1=92.933,P0.001;F2=16.800,P0.001).Valence ratings for happy expressions(6.52±1.11)were rated significantly more positively than other types of expressions(anger 3.42±0.86,fear 3.58±1.02,sad 3.61±1.00,neutral 4.55±0.82).Neutral faces associated with significantly higher valence ratings than anger,fear and sad faces,which were not significantly different from each other(Ps0.05).For self-reported arousal,anger(5.03±1.74)and fear faces(5.05±1.55)were significantly higher than the other types(sad 4.57±1.34,happy 4.23±1.43,neutral 3.64±1.41),whereas arousal ratings for neutral faces were significantly lower than the other types,and there were no other significant differences(Ps0.05).Conclusion:The findings suggest that there is not a one-to-one relationship between expression valence and startle reflex.Startle reflex modulation effect seems to be found only for anger and fear faces.
People with schizophrenia consistently report normal levels of pleasant emotion when exposed to evocative stimuli, suggesting intact consummatory pleasure. However, little is known about the neural correlates and time course of emotion in schizophrenia. This study used a well-validated affective picture viewing task that elicits a characteristic pattern of event-related potentials (ERPs) from early to later processing stages (i.e., P1, P2, P3, and late positive potentials [LPPs]). Thirty-eight stabilized outpatients with schizophrenia and 36 healthy controls viewed standardized pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral pictures while ERPs were recorded and subsequently rated their emotional responses to the stimuli. Patients and controls responded to the pictures similarly in terms of their valence ratings, as well as the initial ERP components (P1, P2, and P3). However, at the later LPP component (500-1,000 ms), patients displayed diminished electrophysiological discrimination between pleasant versus neutral stimuli. This pattern suggests that patients demonstrated normal self-reported emotional experience and intact initial sensory processing of and resource allocation to emotional stimuli. However, they showed a disruption in a later component associated with sustained attentional processing of emotional stimuli.
Our survey shows that the techniques used in data extraction from deep webs need to be improved to achieve the efficiency and accuracy of automatic wrappers. Further investigations indicate that the development of a lightweight ontological technique using existing lexical database for English (WordNet) is able to check the similarity of data records and detect the correct data region with higher precision using the semantic properties of these data records. The advantages of this method are that it can extract three types of data records, namely, single-section data records, multiple-section data records, and loosely structured data records, and it also provides options for aligning iterative and disjunctive data items. Experimental results show that our technique is robust and performs better than the existing state-of-the-art wrappers. Tests also show that our wrapper is able to extract data records from multilingual web pages and that it is domain independent.
The neuropeptide oxytocin has been implicated in a wide range of social processes, such as pair bonding, affiliation, and social judgments that may contribute to normal adjustment and psychiatric states. The present experimental study sought to elucidate potential underlying mechanisms by which oxytocin may impact social processes by examining the effects of intranasal oxytocin on basic evaluative processes. Subjects rated slide stimuli from the International Affective Picture System, varying across multiple categories (pleasant, neutral, unpleasant) and social content. Separate ratings for arousal and for the positive and negative components of valence were obtained in the context of a bivariate evaluative space model. Oxytocin did not have an independent significant effect on positivity or negativity ratings, but instead oxytocin treatment altered the interaction between these component processes for social, relative to non-social stimuli regardless of valence conditions. Specifically, oxytocin, relative to vehicle, significantly decreased arousal ratings to threatening human stimuli without altering ratings of threatening animal stimuli. These results indicate that oxytocin may exert its effects through dynamic alterations in the partially separable neural substrates mediating arousal as well as positive and negative evaluations of social stimuli.
Korean Word Associations (KorWA) were collected to build a semantic network for the Korean language. A graphic representation approach of applying coefficients to complex networks allows us to discern the semantic structures within words. A semantic network of the KorWA was found to exhibit the scalefree property in its degree distribution. The growth of the network around hub words was also confirmed through two experimental phases. As an issue for further research, we suggest that the present results may yield insights for computational neurolinguistics, as a semantic network of word association norms can bridge the gap between information about lexical co-occurrences derived from a corpora and anatomical networks as a basis for mapping out neural activations. 1
In 2004 The New York Times (NYT) launched a weekly Time Supplement (TS) with Taiwan’s United Daily News. This article is intended to explore lexical feature variations between TS headlines and NYT headlines as a discourse strategy, focusing on variations of lexical formality and accessibility. A textual survey and stylistic analysis were conducted on a corpus comprising (i) all the TS news articles published during the eight months ending on October 31, 2008, and (ii) all the corresponding NYT news articles. An attempt was made to establish and analyze the lexical features that characterize TS and NYT headlines. Colloquialisms, idioms, slang expressions, technical terms, and non-English words were found in far more NYT headlines than TS headlines. These lexical feature variations decrease the informality of TS headlines but increase their accessibility to general TS readers, making the writing and reading of TS headlines stylistically less informal or more neutral. Four patterns of dictional variations from NYT to TS headlines were detected: from more to less informal, from first-person to third-person viewpoint, from less to more accessible, and from persuasive to informative. These variation patterns reflect what the headline writers perceive to be the norms for the respective readerships.
The paper investigates lexical repetition in Arabic original literary texts and English translations. The empirical base material consists of a three-part autobiography ( al-Ayyām, by Tāhā Hussein) and its translation ( The Days ). The method involves a mapping of the target text (TT) onto the source text (ST) so as to see how instances of lexical repetition are rendered into the translations and what are the strategies and norms involved in determining certain translation choices. Three types of lexical repetition are studied: lexical-item repetition, lexical-doublet repetition and phrase repetition. Lexical repetition serves two major functions, namely textual and rhetorical. The textual function concerns the potential of repetition for organising the text and rendering it cohesive, while the rhetorical foregrounds a mental image or invokes emotions in emotive language. It is observed that the translation of the autobiography’s second part is characterised mainly by the absence of lexical repetition, contrary to the translations of the first and third parts. Thus, the target text misrepresents the original author as passing through three stages of textual, stylistic development. As to the translation strategies, the findings suggest that the translators vary the ST by using different patterns of reference. Rhetorical repetition is backgrounded by at least one translator who replaces it with pervasive variation. It is argued that the ambivalence of their approaches leads to a misrepresentation of the original text (and perhaps the author) as rather uneven.The strategies for translating lexical repetition highlight the translators’ individual attitudes towards the ST’s norms and their adherence to the linguistic and cultural norms prevalent in the TL environment. On the whole, there is a variation in the degree of bias towards the norms of either SL or TL. In terms of Toury’s norms model, it may be safe to claim that the general trend of translational norms seems to lean more towards the acceptability pole than the adequacy pole, i.e., a TL-oriented strategy is opted for.
Facial expressions are often used in emotion research. Although they may differ in several relevant features such as the intensity of the facial expressions, the picture sets have not been compared systematically. Because the intensity of expressions is thought to determine the level of emotional arousal induced by the stimulus, the first aim of this study was to test whether 2 frequently used sets of emotional facial expressions induce different levels of perceived arousal. Furthermore, we tested whether the sex of the actor modulates arousal ratings. Participants viewed facial expressions from the NimStim set (more intense expressions) and the Karolinska Directed Emotional Faces set (less intense expressions). Female expressions from the Karolinska Directed Emotional Faces but male expressions from the NimStim set were rated as more emotionally arousing. We conclude that less intense female expressions but more intense male expressions may be more potent in inducing emotional responses. This study may encourage researchers to further compare the properties of picture sets.
In three experiments, we explore the link between peripheral physiological arousal and logicality in a deductive reasoning task. Previous research has shown that participants are less likely to provide normatively correct responses when reasoning about emotional compared to neutral contents. Which component of emotion is primarily involved in this effect has not yet been explored. We manipulated the emotional value of the reasoning stimuli through classical conditioning (Experiment 1), with simultaneous presentation of negative/neutral pictures (Experiment 2), or by using intrinsically negative/neutral words (Experiment 3). We measured skin conductance (SC) and subjective affective ratings of the stimuli. In all experiments, we observed a negative relationship between SC and logicality. Participants who showed greater SC reactivity to negative stimuli compared to neutral stimuli were more likely to make logical errors on negative, compared to neutral reasoning contents. There was no such link between affective ratings of the stimuli and the effect of emotion on reasoning.
Background: A crucial question for understanding sentence comprehension is the openness of syntactic and semantic processes for other sources of information. Using event-related potentials in a dual task paradigm, we had previously found that sentence processing takes into consideration task relevant sentence-external semantic but not syntactic information. In that study, internal and external information both varied within the same linguistic domain—either semantic or syntactic. Here we investigated whether across-domain sentence-external information would impact within-sentence processing. Methodology: In one condition, adjectives within visually presented sentences of the structure [Det]-[Noun]-[Adjective]- [Verb] were semantically correct or incorrect. Simultaneously with the noun, auditory adjectives were presented that morphosyntactically matched or mismatched the visual adjectives with respect to gender. Findings: As expected, semantic violations within the sentence elicited N4)
Background: Prosody, the melody and intonation of speech, involves the rhythm, rate, pitch and voice quality to relay linguistic and emotional information from one individual to another. A significant component of human social communication depends upon interpreting and responding to another person's prosodic tone as well as one's own ability to produce prosodic speech. However there has been little work on whether the perception and production of prosody share common neural processes, and if so, how these might correlate with individual differences in social ability. Methods: The aim of the present study was to determine the degree to which perception and production of prosody rely on shared neural systems. Using fMRI, neural activity during perception and production of a meaningless phrase in different prosodic intonations was measured. Regions of overlap for production and perception of prosody were found in premotor regions, in particular the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG). Act)
Background: A trend towards automation of scientific research has recently resulted in what has been termed "data-driven inquiry" in various disciplines, including physics and biology. The automation of many tasks has been identified as a possible future also for the humanities and the social sciences, particularly in those disciplines concerned with the analysis of text, due to the recent availability of millions of books and news articles in digital format. In the social sciences, the analysis of news media is done largely by hand and in a hypothesis-driven fashion: the scholar needs to formulate a very specific assumption about the patterns that might be in the data, and then set out to verify if they are present or not. Methodology/Principal Findings: In this study, we report what we think is the first large scale content-analysis of cross-linguistic text in the social sciences, by using various artificial intelligence techniques. We analyse 1.3 M news articles in 22 languages det)
A leading notion is that language skill acquisition declines between childhood and adulthood. While several lines of evidence indicate that declarative ("what", explicit) memory undergoes maturation, it is commonly assumed that procedural ("how-to", implicit) memory, in children, is well established. The language superiority of children has been ascribed to the childhood reliance on implicit learning. Here we show that when 8-year-olds, 12-year-olds and young adults were provided with an equivalent multi-session training experience in producing and judging an artificial morphological rule (AMR), adults were superior to children of both age groups and the 8-year-olds were the poorest learners in all task parameters including in those that were clearly implicit. The AMR consisted of phonological transformations of verbs expressing a semantic distinction: whether the preceding noun was animate or inanimate. No explicit instruction of the AMR was provided. The 8-year-olds, unlike most adu)
Background: Cultural differences in socialization can lead to characteristic differences in how we perceive the world. Consistent with this influence of differential experience, our perception of faces (e.g., preference, recognition ability) is shaped by our previous experience with different groups of individuals. Methodology/Principal Findings: Here, we examined whether cultural differences in social practices influence our perception of faces. Japanese, Chinese, and Asian-Canadian young adults made relative age judgments (i.e., which of these two faces is older?) for East Asian faces. Cross-cultural differences in the emphasis on respect for older individuals was reflected in participants' latency in facial age judgments for middle-age adult faces—with the Japanese young adults performing the fastest, followed by the Chinese, then the Asian-Canadians. In addition, consistent with the differential behavioural and linguistic markers used in the Japanese culture when interacting with )
Background: Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by a specific triad of symptoms such as abnormalities in social interaction, abnormalities in communication and restricted activities and interests. While verbal autistic subjects may present a correct mastery of the formal aspects of speech, they have difficulties in prosody (music of speech), leading to communication disorders. Few behavioural studies have revealed a prosodic impairment in children with autism, and among the few fMRI studies aiming at assessing the neural network involved in language, none has specifically studied prosodic speech. The aim of the present study was to characterize specific prosodic components such as linguistic prosody (intonation, rhythm and emphasis) and emotional prosody and to correlate them with the neural network underlying them. Methodology/Principal Findings: We used a behavioural test (Profiling Elements of the Prosodic System, PEPS) and fMRI to characterize prosodic deficits a)
Population migrations in Southwest and South China have played an important role in the formation of East Asian populations and led to a high degree of cultural diversity among ethnic minorities living in these areas. To explore the genetic relationships of these ethnic minorities, we systematically surveyed the variation of 10 autosomal STR markers of 1,538 individuals from 30 populations of 25 ethnic minorities, of which the majority were chosen from Southwest China, especially Yunnan Province. With genotyped data of the markers, we constructed phylogenies of these populations with both DA and DC measures and performed a principal component analysis, as well as a clustering analysis by structure. Results showed that we successfully recovered the genetic structure of analyzed populations formed by historical migrations. Aggregation patterns of these populations accord well with their linguistic affiliations, suggesting that deciphering of genetic relationships does in fact offer clue)
Language and music, two of the most unique human cognitive abilities, are combined in song, rendering it an ecological model for comparing speech and music cognition. The present study was designed to determine whether words and melodies in song are processed interactively or independently, and to examine the influence of attention on the processing of words and melodies in song. Event-Related brain Potentials (ERPs) and behavioral data were recorded while nonmusicians listened to pairs of sung words (prime and target) presented in four experimental conditions: same word, same melody; same word, different melody; different word, same melody; different word, different melody. Participants were asked to attend to either the words or the melody, and to perform a same/different task. In both attentional tasks, different word targets elicited an N400 component, as predicted based on previous results. Most interestingly, different melodies (sung with the same word) elicited an N400 componen)
This article describes the discovery of a set of biologically-driven semantic dimensions underlying the neural representation of concrete nouns, and then demonstrates how a resulting theory of noun representation can be used to identify simple thoughts through their fMRI patterns. We use factor analysis of fMRI brain imaging data to reveal the biological representation of individual concrete nouns like apple, in the absence of any pictorial stimuli. From this analysis emerge three main semantic factors underpinning the neural representation of nouns naming physical objects, which we label manipulation, shelter, and eating. Each factor is neurally represented in 3-4 different brain locations that correspond to a cortical network that co-activates in non-linguistic tasks, such as tool use pantomime for the manipulation factor. Several converging methods, such as the use of behavioral ratings of word meaning and text corpus characteristics, provide independent evidence of the centrality )
In the present study, orthographic metrics for Greek children’s Grade 1 and Grade 2 reading materials were presented. Data for five transparency metrics—three of which being neither feedforward nor feedbackward— were presented and offered for use in the research of children’s reading and spelling acquisition. The analysis demonstrated the complex relationships between metrics and compared the results with those obtained for the English language. The structure of these metrics from a variety of corpus sizes was investigated, and we concluded that large corpus sizes do not necessarily make a substantial contribution to the value of such metrics when compared with smaller samples.
We propose a unified model of syntax and discourse in which text structure is viewed as a tree structure augmented with anaphoric relations and other secondary relations. We describe how the model accounts for discourse connectives and the syntax-discourse-semantics interface. Our model is dependency-based, ie, words are the basic building blocks in our analyses. The analyses have been applied cross-linguistically in the Copenhagen Dependency Treebanks, a set of parallel treebanks for Danish, English, German, Italian, and Spanish which are currently being annotated with respect to discourse, anaphora, syntax, morphology, and translational equivalence.
A new ostracism paradigm—O-Cam—was designed to combine the best qualities of both social ostracism (i.e., face-to-face interaction between the target and sources of ostracism) and cyber ostracism (i.e., confederatefree, highly controlled designs) paradigms. O-Cam consists of a simulated Web conference during which participants are either ostracized or included by 2 other participants whose actions, unbeknownst to the participants, are actually pretaped. The findings of preliminary studies indicate that O-Cam provides a powerful ostracism experience that yields psychological and behavioral responses that are consistent with those in other ostracism paradigms (e.g., Cyberball; Williams, 2007). Moreover, unlike in many previous ostracism paradigms, O-Cam provides researchers with the flexibility to manipulate the physical appearance and the verbal/nonbehavior of the sources of ostracism without the need for confederates.
The aim of the present study was to develop and evaluate an ecologically valid approach to assess implicit learning of affective responses in dementia patients. We designed a Face-Emotion-Association paradigm (FEA) that allows to quantify the influence of stimuli with positive and negative valence on affective responses. Two pictures of neutral male faces are rated on the dimensions of valence and arousal before and after aversive versus pleasant fictitious biographical information is paired with each of the pictures. At the second measurement time point, memory for pictures and biographical content is tested. The FEA was tested in 21 patients with dementia and 13 healthy controls. Despite severely impaired explicit memory, patients changed valence and arousal ratings according to the biographical content and did not differ in their ratings from the control group. The results demonstrate that our FEA paradigm is a valid instrument to investigate learning of affective responses in dementia patients.
The human visual system is remarkably tolerant to degradations in image resolution: in a scene recognition task, the performance of subjects is similar whether 32x32 color images or multi-mega pixel images are used. Even object recognition and segmentation is performed robustly by the visual system despite the object being unrecognizable in isolation. We present a set of studies to evaluate the minimal image resolution required to perform a number of recognition tasks (scene recognition, object detection and segmentation) and we show that images need 32x32 color pixels. Performances degrade fast below this resolution. The small size of each image carries two important benefits: (i) it permits computer vision tools to be easily applied and (ii) huge image databases may be easily collected. We present a database of 70,000,000 32x32 color images gathered from the Internet using image search engines. Each image is loosely labeled with one of the 70,399 non-abstract nouns in English, as listed in the Wordnet lexical database. Hence the image database represents a dense sampling of all semantic categories. Computer vision traditionally consider a few unrelated classes which are treated independently to one another. In contrast, we use our database in conjunction with a semantic hierarchy, obtained from Wordnet, to impose tree-structured dependencies between the 70,399 classes.
Reviewed by: Laboratory phonology 8 Jaye Padgett Laboratory phonology 8. Ed. by Louis Goldstein, D. H. Whalen, and Catherine T. Best. (Phonology and phonetics 4-2.) Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2006. Pp. xvi, 675. ISBN 9783110176780. $192 (Hb). This collection of papers is the end-product of the eighth Conference on Laboratory Phonology (LabPhon), held in New Haven, Connecticut, in June 2002, and hosted by Yale University and Haskins Laboratories. The volume is dedicated to the memory of Catherine P. Browman. If the LabPhon conferences and volumes were a bit renegade when they began, they are now more of an institution. It was still unusual in the 1980s to combine phonological theorizing with experimental methods and with theories drawn from phonetics and psycholinguistics, but to do so now seems more the norm. Out of thirteen papers published in the 1989 issue of Phonology, three incorporate experimental methodologies. (I construe ‘experimental’ broadly to include, for example, gestural or neural network modeling and formal learning theory.) In 2009 it was nine out of thirteen. (Six of these were from a special issue called ‘Phonological models and experimental data’; the reader can decide whether this strengthens or weakens the point.) The early ‘labphon’ movement can take credit for much of this change. This year we should see the inaugural publication of a laboratory phonology journal to replace the published volumes. In my view, this shift to a regular, peer-reviewed, and more accessible forum is very welcome. The book contains twenty-six contributions (including four commentary pieces) and an introduction. It is divided into three sections (two of them further subdivided): ‘Qualitative and variable faces of phonological competence’, ‘Sources of variation and their role in the acquisition of phonological competence’, and ‘Knowledge of language-specific organization of speech gestures’. I found these groupings to be nebulous; what comes through much more clearly is a second theme, on sign languages and comparisons between spoken and sign language. The deployment of laboratory methods and ‘philosophy’ in exploring sign languages is an exciting development. Other leitmotifs in the book draw on gestural phonology, exemplar modeling, acquisition, and the roles of abstract and categorical vs. concrete and gradient notions in representation and usage. Some of the papers are probably longer and less clearly written than they might be, but this is a minor complaint about a very interesting collection of works. Given space limitations here, I could not do justice to all twenty-six contributions; instead I focus on highlighting a few of them. Mirjam Ernestus and Harald Baayen, in ‘The functionality of incomplete neutralization in Dutch: The case of past-tense formation’ (27–49), replicate, for one speaker, the finding in Warner et al. 2004, 2006 of incomplete neutralization (IN) of final devoicing in Dutch, based on a reading task involving nonce verb forms. (Unlike in Warner et al., the forms were not presented as minimal pairs.) Particularly interesting are the results of their perception experiments using the speaker’s productions as stimuli. Ernestus and Baayen show that subjects not only detected IN but also used it to choose the appropriate past-tense ending (-te or -de) for the nonce verb stimulus forms, a task that requires the listener to infer the underlying voicing of the stem-final obstruent. The authors argue that IN, as well as their perception results, are due to the storage of lexical paradigms, among other things. Consider for example the form [vεrvεit] ‘widen’ and its infinitival form [vεrvεid n]. Even if the former is stored in its surface form (contrary to the assumption of [End Page 957] most generative phonologists), both the production and the perception of its final consonant will be influenced by activation of the associated form [vεrvεid n] (see also Bybee 2001). IN has posed a serious problem for the traditional understanding of the phonology-phonetics relation, in which discrete phonology is transduced into continuous phonetics, because if /vεrvεid/ is categorically devoiced to [vεrvεit] by phonology, then phonetic implementation has no means of recovering underlying voicing in order to produce IN. The storage and use of entire paradigms circumvents this problem. Since not all...
In this paper we describe FragmentSeeker, a tool which is capable to identify all those tree constructions which are recurring multiple times in a large Phrase Structure treebank. The tool is based on an efficient kernel-based dynamic algorithm, which compares every pair of trees of a given treebank and computes the list of fragments which they both share. We describe two different notions of fragments we will use, i.e. standard and partial fragments, and provide the implementation details on how to extract them from a syntactically annotated corpus. We have tested our system on the Penn Wall Street Journal treebank for which we present quantitative and qualitative analysis on the obtained recurring structures, as well as provide empirical time performance. Finally we propose possible ways our tool could contribute to different research fields related to corpus analysis and processing, such as parsing, corpus statistics, annotation guidance, and automatic detection of argument structure. 1.
The article presents the Russian-Czech lexical database which is being compiled in the Institute of Slavonic Studies AS CR, defines its content, structure and functioning.
In this paper, we present an on-going project aiming at extending the WordNet lexical database by encoding common sense featural knowledge elicited from language speakers. Such extension of WordNet is required in the framework of the STaRS.sys project, which has the goal of building tools for supporting the speech therapist during the preparation of exercises to be submitted to aphasic patients for rehabilitation purposes. We review some preliminary results and illustrate what extensions of the existing WordNet model are needed to accommodate for the encoding of commonsense (featural) knowledge. 1
The paper introduces principles of rescript and lemmatization of lexemes with German origin for Lexical database of Baroque and Humanist Czech made in the Czech Language Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic in Prague.
We carry out two studies on affective state modeling for communication settings that involve unilateral intent on the part of one participant (the evoker) to shift the affective state of another participant (the experiencer). The first investigates viewer response in a narrative setting using a corpus of docu-mentaries annotated with viewer-reported narrative peaks. The second investigates affective triggers in a conversational set-ting using a corpus of recorded interactions, annotated with continuous affective ratings, between a human interlocutor and an emotionally colored agent. In each case, we build a “one-sided ” model using indicators derived from the speech of one participant. Our classification experiments confirm the viabil-ity of our models and provide insight into useful features. Index Terms: affect, speech recognition, audio analysis, natural language communication
FrameSQL is a web-based application which the author (Sato, 2003; Sato 2008) created originally for searching the Berkeley FrameNet lexical database. FrameSQL now can handle the Japanese lexical database built by the Japanese FrameNet project (JFN) of Keio University in Japan. FrameSQL can search and view the JFN data released in March of 2009 on a standard web browser. Users do not need to install any additional software tools to use FrameSQL, nor do they even need to download the JFN data to their local computer, because FrameSQL accesses the database of the server computer, and executes searches. FrameSQL not only shows a clear view of the headword’s grammar and combinatorial properties of the database, but also relates a Japanese word with its counterparts in English. FrameSQL puts together the Japanese and English lexical databases, and the user can access them seamlessly, as if they were a unified database. Mutual hyperlinks among these databases and the bilingual search mode make it easy to compare semantic structures of corresponding lexical units between these languages, and it could be useful for building multilingual lexical resources.
This paper presents a current status of Thai resources and tools for CG development. We also proposed a Thai categorial dependency grammar (CDG), an extended version of CG which includes dependency analysis into CG notation. Beside, an idea of how to group a word that has the same functions are presented to gain a certain type of category per word. We also discuss about a difficulty of building treebank and mention a toolkit for assisting on a Thai CGs tree building and a tree format representations. In this paper, we also give a summary of applications related to Thai CGs. 1