Papers reviewed and determined not to be word norm studies. Use the flag icon to report errors or suggest re-inclusion.
16504 papers
Age of acquisition (AoA) has been reported to be a predictor of the speed of reading words aloud (word naming) and lexical decision, with early-acquired words being responded to faster than later-acquired words in both tasks. All previous studies of AoA effects have, however, relied upon adult estimates of word learning age the validity of which it is easy to cast doubt upon. Using objective age of acquisition norms derived from children's naming data, this study shows that AoA effects do not depend upon the use of adult ratings. In addition to effects of real AoA, influences of word frequency and orthographic neighbourhood size were obtained in both word naming and lexical decision. Imageability affected lexical decision but not word naming, while the characteristics of the word's initial phoneme affected word naming but not lexical decision.
A Classification Information Model is a pattern classification model.The model decides the proper class of an input instance by integrating individual decisions, each of which is made with each feature in the pattern.Each individual decision is weighted according to the distributional property of the feature deriving the decision. An individual decision and its weight are represented as classification information which is extracted from the training instances.In the word sense disambiguation based on the model, the proper sense of an input instance is determined by the weighted sum of whole individual decisions derived from the features contained in the instance.
The ability to circumlocute successfully is of utmost importance in compensating for gaps in lexical knowledge. Although all studies indicate that one’s ability to circumlocute increases with increasing proficiency, it is interesting that little attention has been paid to those learners who have the greatest ability to circumlocute, native‐like speakers. This study addresses the norms of native and native‐like circumlocution. It expands the discussion of strategies involved in this skill to include the means by which speakers frame their message and thereby set the linguistic context for their listeners. Participants in this study, both native and native‐like speakers, were found to employ similar strategies while circumlocuting, including the use of synonyms, analogies, and descriptions. These participants also consistently framed their speech to facilitate listener comprehension, and they frequently included in their discourse some reference to their status as a nonexpert in the field. Similarities in native and native‐like circumlocution found in this study help to provide some empirical validation to the notion of “native‐like.”
Elementary dependency relationships between words within parse trees produced by robust analyzers on a corpus help automate the discovery of semantic classes relevant for the underlying domain. We introduce two methods for extracting elementary syntactic dependencies from normalized parse trees. The groupings which are obtained help identify coarse-grain semantic categories and isolate lexical idiosyncrasies belonging to a specific sublanguage. A comparison shows a satisfactory overlapping with an existing nomenclature for medical language processing. This symbolic approach is efficient on medium size corpora which resist to statistical clustering methods but seems more appropriate for specialized texts.
We present a memory-based learning (MBL) approach to shallow parsing in which POS tagging, chunking, and identification of syntactic relations are formulated as memory-based modules. The experiments reported in this paper show competitive results, the F-value for the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) treebank is: 93.8% for NP chunking, 94.7% for VP chunking, 77.1% for subject detection and 79.0% for object detection.
Absract Hanne Ruus's thesis on Central Parts of The Danish Lexical Norm is a very beautiful book. The author and the publisher have bestowed great care on these two volumes and should be proud of the result. It is a pleasure to take them in hand and consult them: tatsteful, nice cover and binding, exquisite paper quality, excellent typography and layout.
Two studies were performed to assess the validity of a World-Wide Web (WWW) measure of self-monitoring. In Study 1, Usenet Newsgroups likely to be read by high and low self-monitors were identified and a comparison was made of the extent to which contributors engaged in a form of self-presentation (use ofhandles orscreen names) likely to be influenced by self-monitoring tendencies. Handles were used significantly more frequently in thehigh self-monitoring Newsgroups, supporting the distinction made. In Study 2, participants recruited through these sets of Newsgroups completed the WWW-mediated test. Those from the high self-monitoring groups scored significantly higher. Self-reports of self-monitoring behavior also reflected scores on the scale. The results are interpreted as demonstrating the construct validity of the instrument used and the viability of criterion-group-oriented methods in Internet-mediated research.
Active server pages permit a software developer to customize the Web experience for users by inserting server-side script and database access into Web pages. This paper describes applications of these techniques and provides a primer on the use of these methods. Applications include a system that generates and grades individualized homework assignments and tests for statistics students. The student accesses the system as a Web page, prints out the assignment, does the assignment, and enters the answers on the Web page. The server, running on NT Server 4.0, grades the assignment, updates the grade book (on a database), and returns the answer key to the student.
This research assessed an interactive satellite-based training program integrating interactive audiovisual experiences with face-to-face interactions. Key elements were content created by experts, high-quality video segments, satellite-based interaction, off-line interactions among teams of parents and caregivers, workshops, and team building exercises. For pragmatic reasons, it was necessary to develop brief assessment instruments concurrently with training. A large set of survey items were created from draft materials and reduced empirically through piloting to those with the best psychometric properties. To avoid the appearance of traditional testing, knowledge was assessed with Likert items. Surveys measured participant satisfaction, knowledge, attitudes, and the application and articulation of concepts. Participant satisfaction was high. Participants increased positive attitudes and learned appropriate vocabulary. Training was more effective than no training or watching videotapes. The program appears to represent a viable model of training that could successfully be applied to Internet technologies.
Object Relocation is a computer program for Windows 95, with which experiments on spatial memory for object locations can be designed, run, and analyzed. Because of its clear graphical user interface, no long and complex command syntax is needed. Basically, a stimulus consists of a frame that contains a chosen number of locations (i.e., the actual spatial layout) to which objects can be assigned. When the experiment is run, these stimuli are presented to the subject for a variable period of time. Subsequently (either with or without a delay), the objects are presented in a row above the frame and have to be relocated to the correct positions. Finally, the raw data can be analyzed efficiently, using various error scores, and an SPSS-ready output file can be produced. Object Relocation is a very flexible program: New objects and positions can easily be added, and various options for presentation and relocation are present.
Rapid expansion in the digitization of image and image collections has vastly increased the numbers of images available to scholars and researchers through electronic means. This research review will familiarize the reader with current research applicable to the development of image retrieval systems and provides additional material for exploring the topic further, both in print and online. The discussion will cover several broad areas, among them classification and indexing systems used for describing image collections and research initiatives into image access focusing on image attributes, users, queries, tasks, and cognitive aspects of searching. Prospects for the future of image access, including an outline of future research initiatives, are discussed. Further research in each of these areas will provide basic data which will inform and enrich image access system design and will hopefully provide a richer, more flexible, and satisfactory environment for searching for and discovering images. Harnessing the true power of the digital image environment will only be possible when image retrieval systems are coherently designed from principles derived from the fullest range of applicable disciplines, rather than from isolated or fragmented perspectives.
We are experimenting with the representation of a DTD and associated documents (i.e., documents conformant to the DTD) in a knowledge representation (KR) system, in order to provide more sophisticated query and retrieval from TEI documents than current systems provide. We are using CLASSIC, a frame-based representation system developed at AT&T Bell Laboratories. Like many KR systems, CLASSIC enables the definition of structured concepts/frames, their organization into taxonomies, the creation and manipulation of individual instances of such concepts, and inference such as inheritance, relation transitivity, inverses, etc. In addition, CLASSIC provides for the key inferences of subsumption and classification. By representing a document as an individual instance of a hierarchy of concepts derived from the DTD, and by allowing the creation of additional user-defined concepts and relations, sophisticated query and retrieval operations can be performed. This paper describes CLASSIC and the formalism of description logic that underlies it, and demonstrates how it can be used for enhanced retrieval from richly encoded documents.
A study commissioned by the Canadian Institute for Historical Microreproductions produced some interesting secondary findings about the attitudes of the Canadian research community towards digitized facsimile collections. In written responses to a questionnaire designed primarily to elicit advice about the subject content and focus of future projects, and in structured follow-up interviews, many respondents demonstrated a marked ambivalence towards the concept of digitized collections. Furthermore, if faced with a choice between fully searchable text and digitized facsimile images with traditional points of access (subject, author, title, etc.), there appears to be a preference for the latter means of access.
This article explores the importance of register variation for analyses of grammar and discourse. The general theme is illustrated through consideration of variability in the form and use of English complement clauses. First, the patterns of use for four related grammatical constructions are considered: that-clauses and to-clauses, headed by verbs and by nouns. The differing discourse functions of each construction type are explored by considering their lexico-grammatical associations (i.e. the verbs or nouns most commonly occurring as the head of each type). However, it is shown that the characteristic uses of each type are conditioned by register. That is, each construction type has a different distribution across spoken and written registers, with a different set of associated lexical heads. A second study provides an even more striking illustration of this interaction between grammar, discourse, and register: the contextual factors conditioning the retention vs omission of the complementizer that. In this case, it is shown that each register has an overall norm, and that contextual factors are influential only when they work in opposition to that register norm. These case studies are presented to make the general point that analyses of grammar and discourse are often inadequate and misleading when they disregard register differences. Instead, a register perspective is required to capture the range of variability associated with grammatical patterns of use.
The rapid political changes that have taken place in Eastern Europe over the past five years have brought about a sudden disintegration of many well-established social, economic and cultural patterns. This process is clearly visible in the languages of the former 'socialist camp'. Standard Russian (the Russian literary language) has in the past few years undergone such far-reaching changes that it is already possible to speak of its having acquired a new functional status: by escaping the tight boundaries of a rigorous purism and by a renewal of its lexical and phraseological resources, it has become much more democratic, cosmopolitan and dynamic. Where there was formerly a set of rules drawn up by 'the guardians of the purity of the Russian language', who used as their models either the literature of the classics and of the 'socialist realist' period or else the clichés of bureaucratic 'journalese', a preference is now shown for the language of the 'de-sovietised' mass media and for a spontaneous living language (including sub-standard elements and various forms of slang) which is no longer subject to the control of censors or the army of in-house editors. It is significant that under the pressure of the present language situation even those linguists who until recently were not prepared to contemplate any departure from the strict principles of 'language purity' or 'language culture' (культура речи) are now forced either to rely on the fluid and in many respects subjective criterion of 'language taste' (языковой вкус) or else to recognise the existence of a 'vulgarisation of the present-day literary norm' (вульгаризация современной литературной нормы).1KeywordsShock TherapyRussian LanguageSlavonic LanguageLanguage SituationLanguage CultureThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
Latent semantic analysis (LSA) serves as both a theory and a method for representing the meaning of words based on a statistical analysis of their contextual usage (Foltz, 1996; Landauer & Dumais, 1997). In experiments in the domains of psychology and history, we compared the representation of readers’ knowledge structures of information learned from texts with the representation generated by LSA. Results indicated that LSA’s representation is similar to readers’ representations. In addition, the degree to which the reader’s representation is similar to LSA’s representation is indicative of the amount of knowledge the reader has acquired and of the reader’s reading ability. This approach has implications both as a model of learning from text and as a practical tool for performing knowledge assessment.
This paper report on some of the concrete outcomes of a larger research project on the study of syntactic change. In this part of the project, we are collecting and encoding historical texts and tagging them for syntactic analysis. We have so far produced a TEI-conformant version of an Old French text, La Vie de Saint Louis written by Jehan de Joinville around 1305, and we are in the process of adding syntactic tags to this text. Those syntactic tags are derived from the Penn-Helsinki coding scheme, which had been devised for the syntactic encoding of Middle English texts, and have been translated into TEI.
We present a novel approach for measuring body size estimation in normal and eating-disordered women and men. Clinical categories of body types were used as prototypes. By comparing the subjective appearance of a person’s body with prototypes, we can understand how different attributes of his or her body shape contribute to perception of body size. After lifelike random distortions have been applied to parts of their body image, individuals adjust their body shapes until they converge on their perceived veridical appearance. Exaggeration and minimization of particular body areas measured with respect to their true shape and with different prototypes can be expressed as numerical deviations. In this way, perceived body size and body attractiveness can be appraised during the course of diagnosis and treatment of eating disorders.
The use of computerized psychological assessment is a growing practice among contemporary mental health professionals. Many popular and frequently used paper-and-pencil instruments have been adapted into computerized versions. Although equivalence for many instruments has been evaluated and supported, this issue is far from resolved. This literature review deals with recent research findings that suggest that computer aversion negatively impacts computerized assessment, particularly as it relates to measures of negative affect. There is a dearth of equivalence studies that take into account computer aversion’s potential impact on the measurement of negative affect. Recommendations are offered for future research in this area.
This paper develops a solution to the problem of importing existing TEI data into an existing object-oriented database schema without changing the TEI data or the database schema. The solution is based on architectural processing. Two meta-DTDs are used, one to define the architectural forms for the object model and another to map the existing SGML data onto those forms. A full example using a critical text in TEI markup is developed.
This study describes the typical course and variability in major areas of communicative development for 228 Swedish-speaking children between 8 and 16 months of age. The assessments were made by parental reports with the Swedish Early Communicative Development Inventories (SECDI) using a semi-longitudinal design. Age-based norms for understanding of phrases, vocabulary comprehension, vocabulary production and use of gestures are described at the 10th, 25th, 50th, 75th and 90th percentile levels. More lexical verbs were found among the first words in comprehension than in production. An extensive variability within individuals in onset and development was found for the assessed skills. The individual differences proved to be stable over 4–6 months. No gender differences were found for comprehension of phrases, total gestures, vocabulary compre-hension, or for vocabulary production. Strong, unique associations were found between total gestures and vocabulary comprehension and between vocabulary comprehension and vocabulary production. In contrast, no unique association was found between gestures and vocabulary production. The results generally concur with those reported for English-speaking American children by Fenson et al. (1993, 1994).
For online yellow pages and product catalogs, structured content representations coupled with linguistic ontologies can increase both recall and precision of content based retrieval. Our OntoSeek system adopts a language of limited expressiveness for content representation and uses a large ontology based on WordNet for content matching. WordNet is a linguistic database formed by synsets-terms grouped into semantic equivalence sets, each one assigned to a lexical category (noun, verb, adverb, adjective). Each synset represents a particular sense of an English word and is usually expressed as a unique combination of synonymous words.
The digitization of library documents and archives increasingly extends to audiovisual (AV) document repositories. As a consequence, new computer-aided techniques are being devised, providing opportunities for new uses of AV documents. As scholars work mainly by reading, annotating, reusing, and producing documents they are directly concerned by these changes. The first part of this article describes AV document use in the humanities, as well as the current and future influence computers might have on evolving practices. After establishing that “full-indexing” (indexing of the content for random access to any segment of an AV document) is a necessary condition if scholars are to develop new practices in using AV material, we will focus on the specific problems raised by AV indexing as opposed to text indexing, followed by a discussion of related AV indexing projects as well as standardization issues. The third part will propose a representation model for the description of AV material (AI-Strata) and an exchange format of AV annotations (AEDI), based on a free segmentation approach. An example of annotation is also provided. The last part is devoted to a discussion regarding potential long-term influences of digital AV indexing techniques on scholarly uses of AV documents.
Mylonas and Renear introduce a volume of selected papers from The Text Encoding Initiative 10th Anniversary Conference, held at Brown University in November 1997. The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), was launched in 1987 and sponsored by the Association for Computers and the Humanities, the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing, and the Association for Computational Linguistics. It had as its original objective the development of an interchange language for textual data. This effort was completely successful and the TEI Guidelines are now widely accepted as the standard interchange format for textual data. Mylonas and Renear also note that the TEI has accomplished two other major achievements: it has produced a powerful new data description language (which is influencing the development of new WWW standards); and, most importantly, it has motivated the development of an entirely new research community, focused on understanding the role of text structure and markup in the use of emerging information technologies in culture, scholarship, and communication.
This paper examines the use of an unsupervised statistical model for determining the attachment of ambiguous coordinate phrases (CP) of the form nl p n2 cc n3. The model presented here is based on JAR98], an unsupervised model for determining prepositional phrase attachment. After training on unannotated 1988 Wall Street Journal text, the model performs at 72% accuracy on a development set from sections 14 through 19 of the WSJ TreeBank [MSM93].
Raziskana sta dva izpridevnigka glagolska besedotvorna vzorca: ~inhoativno<< obrazilo -eti in ~faktitivno-obrazilo i t i. Poglavitni cilj raziskave je ugotavljanje moinosti za merjenje produktivnosti besedotvornih
This paper uses an information-based approach to conduct feature types selection for language modeling in a systematic manner.We describe a quantitative analysis of the information gain and the information redundancy for various combinations of feature types inspired by both dependency structure and bigram structure through analyzing an English treebank corpus and taking word prediction as the object.The experiments yield several conclusions on the predictive value of several feature types and feature types combinations for word prediction, which are expected to provide reliable reference for feature type selection in language modeling.
Reversing a One-Way Bilingual Dictionary* Leonard Newmark "One day we will go back to Kosov[a]. That's our land." — Ramada Shaqiri, 30 March 1999 Afi fter completing a ten-year project to write an Albanian dicLtionary, published in March 1998 by Oxford University Press as the Oxford Albanian-English Dictionary and designed specifically for users who want to read Albanian and whose access language is English, I decided to prepare a companion English-Albanian dictionary for users who want to write Albanian, but I did not want to devote another ten years to that compilation. I wondered whether I could produce a useful bilingual dictionary with the reverse orientation by automatic conversion of the entries in the data files from which the first dictionary was generated. This paper is a report on the degree to which the attempt succeeded and the degree to which human intervention was required. Examples are provided to illustrate some rather surprising results, and a general conclusion is drawn for bilingual lexicography. For languages of limited worldwide commercial importance, like Albanian, it seems particularly important to use computational techniques to derive new dictionaries from lexical data files compiled for some other purpose, especially if those files are extensive and have information otherwise difficult to come by in machine-readable form. The richness of the lexical data files from which my Albanian-English dictionary was generated is evidenced by that dictionary's 75,000 entries and subentries, more than are found in any other dictionary of Albanian. Those files already provide a number of features that dis- *This paper is a reworked and expanded version of the paper I presented at the 8th EURALEX International Congress (4-8 August 1998) and published in the proceedings of that congress. 38Leonard Newmark tinguished this dictionary from many other bilingual dictionaries: 1) inclusion of large numbers of nonstandard items (marked by asterisks ) as well as all attested standard stems; 2) marking of morpheme boundaries in Albanian words; 3) inclusion of some 16,700 phrasal expressions, in particular, phrasal names, collocations, idioms, and proverbs; 4) use of large numbers of bipartite definitions with a discursive description of the sense followed, after a colon, by English synonyms exemplifying that sense; 5) inclusion of large numbers of terms for grasses, flowers, birds, and fish with their scientific definitions; 6) inclusion of a modest amount of encyclopedic information to explain words whose strictly lexical meaning would not make their use in Albanian contexts intelligible; 7) listing of the various stem forms of lexemes as separate entries in their own alphabetical position to enable readers to decipher otherwise mystifying forms encountered in actual texts; 8) indication of the specific limits of variation that leave idiomatic senses intact (e.g., in phrasal expressions, marking a verb that can appear in any of its inflected forms by giving it in citation form with a symbol (·) at the end of the stem); 9) elaborate labeling of Albanian distinctions in domain and register; 10) rendition of phrasal expressions by stylistically similar English expressions, frequently supplemented by literal translations (enclosed in quotation marks) to enable more nuanced understanding. Each entry in the plain text, flat data files from which the Albanian-English dictionary was generated is a line consisting of an Albanian word or phrase followed by a definition in English (or by a cross-reference to another line). Each line is embedded with simple visible two-letter formatting codes (e.g., HW [headword], DF [definition], TK [technical name], CO [collocation] ) immediately preceded by a period (.) and immediately followed by what will get the formatting assigned by that code. The easily redefinable codes are later translated by a set of UNIX scripts into formatting instructions in TeX, which can go directly to a printer or indirectly by translation into Post-Script files. The simplicity of such transparent and flexible coding for entering the data, in contrast with elaborate schemes requiring complex coding by experts into predefined structures,1 was initially dictated by limits typical of languages that attract little commercial interest and 'For example, those used in the architecture described by Willy Martin and Anne Tamm in "OMBI: An editor for constructing reversible lexical databases," EURALEX '96 Proceedings...
`Linguistic annotation' covers any descriptive or analytic notations applied to raw language data. The basic data may be in the form of time functions -- audio, video and/or physiological recordings -- or it may be textual. The added notations may include transcriptions of all sorts (from phonetic features to discourse structures), part-of-speech and sense tagging, syntactic analysis, `named entity' identification, co-reference annotation, and so on. While there are several ongoing efforts to provide formats and tools for such annotations and to publish annotated linguistic databases, the lack of widely accepted standards is becoming a critical problem. Proposed standards, to the extent they exist, have focussed on file formats. This paper focuses instead on the logical structure of linguistic annotations. We survey a wide variety of existing annotation formats and demonstrate a common conceptual core, the annotation graph. This provides a formal framework for constructing, maintaining and searching linguistic annotations, while remaining consistent with many alternative data structures and file formats.
This paper challenges traditional notions of plagiarism as an act of academic deviance and suggests that, particularly for LBOTE students.'plagiarism'is often a text-based practice that reflects different cultural and linguistic norms. The author suggests that western institutions' ambivalent and inconsistent approach to the practice further clouds the issue for students and teachers
The act of healing essentially includes a spiritual or religious component, and language is often a prime medium for enacting it. Personal narratives are sites for the negotiation and construction of cultural and linguistic norms; healing stories recontextualize bodily struggles as social and spiritual conflicts. This paper examines a personal narrative of spiritual healing told in the language of Rastafari, the Jamaican religious movement. A discourse analysis of the narrative focuses on elements of Rasta Talk in order to discover how Rastafarian beliefs underlie and shape the telling, which is itself an act of faith and a profession of commitment. The healing itself, however, draws primarily on a variety of nonRasta spiritual and occult traditions of Jamaican folk culture; their relation to Rastafari, and the reasons for employing Rasta religious rhetoric in the narrative, are also explored. Rasta Talk, a register of Jamaican Creole (JC) undergoing functional expansion, is characteristically (though by no means exclusively) used by Jamaicans who follow the Rastafari religion. Rastafari is a syncretic Afro-Christian faith which invokes and reinterprets Old Testament Biblical imagery in the service of particular religious, cultural and political themes. This narrative of supernatural illness and cure applies a historical critique of colonialism and racism to the healthcare system, allows the teller to reposition himself discursively to alleviate suffering and stigma, and claims the moral high ground for AfroJamaican ethnomedical practices and traditional values through the enactment of Rastafarian principles. Rastafari is briefly introduced first in relation to other Jamaican faith traditions, and Rasta Talk is described. The narrative is outlined chronologically. Subsequent analysis links linguistic features to key elements of Rasta beliefs, which – together with elements of Jamaican folk medicine and culture – provide the necessary context to understand the healing narrative as an act of identity.
Corpus linguistics, lexical semantics, DANwORD, Zinkernagel, cognitive semantics
Behaviour studies were conducted on 12 adult rams of Garole breeds which were transported from hot humid climate of Sunderban area of West Bengal to semi-arid climate of Avikanagar in Rajasthan. The observations were recorded on their agnostic, investigatory, precopulatory, mounting and ejaculatory behaviour with a view to assess dominance, libido and serving capacity of these rams under semi-arid environment. The dominance rating of these rams were recorded on the basis of incidences of chasing, bunting and fights. The dominant rams had higher frequency and higher number of investigations of ewes. The incidence of anogential sniffing and frequency of bouts of leg kicking were also higher in dominant rams. The latency period, the number of mounts between ejaculations and time taken for first, second and third ejaculations were consistently lower in dominant rams.
A new method for assessing the effectiveness of neurobiological teaching for psychiatrists is described. Operationalized ratings of familiarity with neurobiological concepts derived from recent conference keywords were assessed before and after a teaching module. This evaluation was applied to a sample of trainees in Hong Kong. It was found that after the course, there was a broad improvement in familiarity with a large proportion concepts. The evaluation method is simple, efficient, externally referenced as well as capable of responding to new knowledge.
In this paper we develop a formalization of semantic relations that facilitates efficient implementations of relations in lexical databases or knowledge representation systems using bases. The formalization of relations is based on a modeling of hierarchical relations in Formal Concept Analysis. Further, relations are analyzed according to Relational Concept Analysis, which allows a representation of semantic relations consisting of relational components and quantificational tags. This representation utilizes mathematical properties of semantic relations. The quantificational tags imply inheritance rules among semantic relations that can be used to check the consistency of relations and to reduce the redundancy in implementations by storing only the basis elements of semantic relations. The research presented in this paper is an example of an application of Relational Concept Analysis to lexical databases and knowledge representation systems (cf. Priss 1996) which is part of a larger framework of research on natural language analysis and formalization.
Imaging work has begun to elucidate the spatial organization of emotions; the temporal organization, however, remains unclear. Adaptive behavior relies on rapid monitoring of potentially salient cues (typically with high emotional value) in the environment. To clarify the timing and speed of emotional processing in the two human brain hemispheres, event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded during hemifield presentation of face images. ERPs were separately computed for disliked and liked faces, as individually assessed by postrecording affective ratings. After stimulation of either hemisphere, personal affective judgements of face images significantly modulated ERP responses at early stages, 80-116 ms after right hemisphere and 104-160 ms after left hemisphere stimulation. This is the first electrophysiological evidence for valence-dependent, automatic, i.e. pre-attentive emotional processing in humans.
Hebrew Studies 40 (1999) 269 Reviews grams that serve as excellent visual aids. The work is written in a highly technical language that assumes familiarity with the terminology. shorthand, and conceptual framework of Generative Grammar. and this limits its accessibility and appeal to a wide readership. The inclusion of a glossary andlor a brief overview of this method of linguistic study would help address this problem. The book's title is somewhat inaccurate since it does not offer a truly comparative study of Hebrew and Arabic syntax. It is principally an analysis of Hebrew which makes reference to other languages to explicate and illustrate Shlonsky's ideas on Hebrew. While Arabic is cited more frequently than any other language besides Hebrew. there are lengthy sections of the book in which it never figures in the discussion. For example. there is not a single reference to Arabic in the thirty-page chapter treating subject-verb inversion. A further problem concerns the inconsistent manner in which Shlonsky appeals to the Arabic evidence. Throughout the book, he argues his case by referring to several different forms of the language. including Standard Arabic and the dialects from Palestine. Southern Palestine. Morocco, and Egypt. Each of these is a unique linguistic system that is distinct from the others but Shlonsky does not pay sufficient attention to the differences among them. This method hinders the purported comparative focus of his work since the reader is not sure which Arabic is meant to be the primary point of comparison. Consistent reliance upon one form of the language would have been a more beneficial approach to adopt. Such relatively minor problems do not significantly detract from the many strengths of this volume and the important contribution it makes. Shlonsky's book is required reading for anyone interested in serious study of Hebrew and will be a major work in the field. John Kaltner Rhodes College Memphis, TN 38112 kaltner@rhodes.edu THE SEMANTICS OF ASPECT AND MODALITY: EVIDENCE FROM ENGLISH AND BIBLICAL HEBREW. By Galia Hatav. Studies in Language Companion Series 34. Pp. x + 224. Philadelphia. PA: John Benjamins, 1997. Cloth, $85.00. Originally a dissertation at Tel-Aviv University. this work "aims to provide a general (semantic) theory for temporality...but it also systemati- Hebrew Studies 40 (l999) 270 Reviews cally examines the verb system in Biblical-Hebrew...which lacks tenses, as will be demonstrated, and thus enables us to see the nature of aspect and modality more clearly" (p. I). The author's theoretical assumption is "that TAM, i.e., the Tense-Aspect-Modal system in language, should be defmed within truth conditional semantics, in terms of temporality, rather than within a pragmatic approach which deals with it in terms of perspective, attitude, and the like" (although pragmatics is not ignored altogether, p. 195). Moreover, she seeks to analyze the data within the framework of a threefold distinction. Here she builds on the work of Hans Reichenbach, who argued that the contrast between the time of speech (S-time) and the time in which the event actually took place (E-time) is not sufficient to account for verbal uses. A third category is needed, namely, the time of reference (R-time), a somewhat fuzzy concept that Hatav defmes as a time unit that contains (or is contained in, or is ordered with) the E-time (pp. 3-5). In the introductory chapter the author, after explaining these and other assumptions, surveys previous attempts to account for the verbal system of biblical Hebrew; unfortunately, she seems unaware of Bruce K. Waltke and M. O'Connor, Biblical Hebrew Syntax, which gives considerable attention to verbal aspect She further informs us that she examined sixty-two chapters taken from the Pentateuch and the Former Prophets (excluding poetic material, since "poetry often violates otherwise valid linguistic norms," p. 24) and gives us some details regarding her method. Following the lead of discourse-analysis scholars, such as R. Longacre, she argues that "the biblical Hebrew system organizes the text into sequential and non-sequential material," but that in addition to sequentiality, three other temporal parameters are needed. These four parameters are individually considered in the following chapters. Chapter 2, accordingly, deals...
本稿では, ツリーバンクを用いて入力文と類似した文の構文木から入力文に対する構文木を類推する手法を提案する. この手法は用例に基づく解析手法の1つであるが, 統計情報や意味的類似性ではなく, 複数のツリーバンク内データの問で定義される特定の類似関係に基づいて構文解析を行う. 特にここではツリーバンク内の知識表現形式をそのまま使って構文解析を行うため, 比較的容易に他の解析手法との融合を考えることができる. またこの手法は辞書などを用いず, データ間の類似性のみに基づいて解析を行うため, 未知語などを含む入力に対しても頑健に働く. ここでは特に基本原理として働く類似関係の有効性を評価するためにPenn Treebankを用いて評価実験を行った. その結果, 単語の表層情報と品詞情報を用いることで解析可能な文の約70%が一意に正しく解析でき, また誤ったものについても比較的正解に似た構文木を出力することができた.
1019 Aminophylline-based creams are marketed as fat reducing agents for the thighs. The purposes of this study were to determine if: 1) a thigh reducing cream would influence body image, 2) product price would influence perception of effectiveness and, 3) the product would decrease thigh size. Serving as their own control, 11 women with thigh cellulite were randomly assigned to a double-blinded, counterbalanced cream treatment with 2% aminophylline (A) on one leg and a placebo (P) on the other (age: 26±7 yrs.; BMI: 23±2 kg/m2; Body Fat (BF): 24±4%; VO2: 39±4 ml/kg/min). They were also randomly assigned into a fictitious expensive (E) or inexpensive (I) cream treatment group. In the lab, subjects massaged 4.5 g of either A or P cream for 1 min into each thigh 5 d/wk for 6 wks. Pre/post testing was done 1 wk prior and immediately after the 6 wk intervention. Dependent measures included thigh girth and skinfolds (distal, mid, proximal to patella) and psychological indices (mood, body image, rating of effectiveness). Results: No significant differences (NSD) were found at baseline between the E vs. I groups for VO2, %BF, or BMI (Independent T's, p>.20). NSD were found for the right vs. left thigh measures at baseline, nor for pre-post measures of VO2, %BF, or BMI (Paired T's, p>.22). NSD were found for skinfold and girth measures between A vs. P-treated thighs (Paired T's, p>.10). Subjects in both the E and I groups reported improved thigh image (Friedman 2-way ANOVA, p=.046), but neither the E nor I group were influenced by product cost (Mann-Whitney U-Wilcoxon Rank Sum Test, p>.17). Conclusions: The 2% A cream was not effective in reducing thigh size, however, the subjects felt more positive about their thighs and overall body build. (Partially supported by FAU Foundation)
Discusses the linguistic influences on an electronic publishing infrastructure in an environment with unstable linguistic standardization from the computational point of view. Essentially, in Serbia in the last half of the century (at least) publishing is based on the following facts: two alphabetic systems are regularly in use with the possibility to mix both alphabets in the same document; the various dialects are accepted as a part of a linguistic norm; orthography is unstable ‐ presently, several linguistic attitudes that have different views of the orthographic norm are under discussion; and, in Serbia, many minority languages are in use, which makes it difficult to provide efficient contact between different communities through electronic publishing. In this context, a systematic solution that responds to this complex situation has not been developed in the frame of traditional Serbian linguistics and lexicography in a way that enables the adequate incorporation of the new publishing technologies. Owing to these constraints, the direct application of electronic publishing tools frequently causes the degradation of the linguistic message. In such an environment, the promotion of electronic publishing therefore needs specific solutions. The paper discusses the general frame based on the specifically encoded system of electronic dictionaries that makes electronic texts independent of some of the mentioned constraints. The objective of such a frame is to enable the linguistic normalization of texts at the level of their internal representation, and to establish bridges for communicating with other language societies. Some aspects of electronic text representation that ensures its correct interpretation in different graphical systems and in different dialects are described. This also allows text indexing and retrieval using the same techniques that are available for languages not burdened with these problems.
We examined male and female abservers' reactions to the use of touch by a nurse towards a patient in a hospital situation. The results suggest that an overrall pattern for observers to react more favorably to the nurse touch compared to no touch in interacting with patients may be judged in part by the attitudes of males and females about the use of touch. The generally favorable reaction to the use of touch by a nurse is consistent with Lewis et al's (1995) study. However, in contrast to their study, there were no differences in the nurse's supportiveness, competence, affect ratings and nurse's confidence in the low touch and high touch conditions.
This paper presents a pronoun resolution algorithm that adheres to the constraints and rules of Centering Theory (Grosz et al., 1995) and is an alternative to Brennan et al.'s 1987 algorithm. The advantages of this new model, the Left-Right Centering Algorithm (LRC), lie in its incremental processing of utterances and in its low computational overhead. The algorithm is compared with three other pronoun resolution methods: Hobbs' syntax-based algorithm, Strube's S-list approach, and the BFP Centering algorithm. All four methods were implemented in a system and tested on an annotated subset of the Treebank corpus consisting of 2026 pronouns. The noteworthy results were that Hobbs and LRC performed the best.
This paper explores the automatic construction of a multilingual Lexical Knowledge Base from preexisting lexical resources. We present a new approach for linking already existing lexical/semantic hierarchies. The Relaxation labeling algorithm is used to select --among all the candidate connections proposed by a bilingual dictionary-- the right connection for each node in the taxonomy. We also propose several ways in which this technique could be applied to enrich and improve existing lexical databases.