Papers reviewed and determined not to be word norm studies. Use the flag icon to report errors or suggest re-inclusion.
18265 papers
The Universal Dependencies (UD) project has grown rapidly through semi-automatic conversion of existing treebanks, but ensuring the quality of converted annotations remains a challenge. Manual verification does not scale, and existing automatic methods cannot distinguish conversion errors from inherent annotation complexity. We present a method that addresses this gap by training two parsers on a token-aligned parallel corpus: one on the original annotation and one on its UD conversion. By requiring correct predictions from the parser trained on the original annotation, our approach isolates errors specifically introduced during conversion while filtering out cases where the construction is simply difficult to parse. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this method on the SynTagRus corpus and its UD counterpart. To enable a direct comparison, we created a fully token-aligned version of the two corpora, resolving differences in tokenization and ellipsis representation. We also proposed a simple method for aligning syntactic relations across the two corpora, addressing the fact that relations involving the same token do not always correspond due to differences in annotation schemes. Our analysis identified several hundred errors in the test set. These comprise six distinct types of conversion errors, three of which persist in the current converter, and ten groups of annotation inconsistencies between the old and new corpus parts. Our method offers a practical, scalable tool for conversion error detection and is applicable to any language pair with aligned original and converted annotations.
Humans are inherently social beings, and social cues such as faces and voices guide attention and behavior. Auditory perception, especially binaural hearing, is essential for social cognition, enabling sound localization and speech comprehension in noisy environments. Deficits in auditory processing can impair social functioning, and conditions such as social anxiety are linked to reduced social functioning. Since social functioning is closely linked to overall well-being, improving social behavior represents a key objective in psychological research. Virtual reality (VR) is increasingly used to study social behavior due to its flexibility and ecological validity. However, users often report limited social presence, reducing the effectiveness of VR-based interventions especially for social anxiety. One reason may be the dominance of visual over auditory realism: audio is often presented in mono or stereo, reducing naturalness and presence. Binaural auralizations, which provide realistic, externalized spatial audio, may enhance presence and support virtual social interactions. This thesis pursues four main research objectives: identifying suitable behavioral and subjective measures for evaluating binaural realism; assessing immersion, realism, and audio quality across auralization techniques; comparing synthetic and natural speech in a socially stressful VR scenario; and examining effects of binaural audio on affect, presence, and attention under varying social stress levels. Study 1 examined how the virtual visual scene and measurement method affect localization and distance perception of physical sound sources. Across two experiments (N=60), audiovisual incongruence reduced localization accuracy but did not affect presence or realism. Distance estimation was influences by the interaction of task and scene: overestimation increased when using a placement task in a reduced-visibility scene. Study 2 compared localization accuracy for loudspeakers and four virtual audio renderings using a placement task and a gaze-based paradigm (N=49). Binaural renderings produced slightly lower localization accuracy but similar ratings of social presence and realism. A simple generic rendering performed as well as more complex ones. Only the anchor condition lacked externalization and was inferior across measures. Social presence and subjective realism were strongly correlated. Study 3 compared AI-generated text-to-speech with natural human speech in the Trier Social Stress Test (N=40). Both conditions elicited substantial stress responses and produced similar presence and affect ratings, demonstrating the practicality of synthetic speech in virtual social interactions. Study 4 investigated audiovisual realism in a virtual social stress scenario (N=78). A high-stress group showed stronger physiological and subjective stress responses than a low-stress group. Binaural audio increased perceived realism and externalization but did not affect social presence, stress responses, or gaze behavior. High arousal across all groups may have masked audio effects. Across all 4 studies, social anxiety did not consistently affect auditory perception or presence but influenced affective states and subjective evaluations of the interaction. Overall, the findings highlight the importance of VR-specific auditory perception and the role of acoustic immersion. Auditory realism enhances social and physical presence, though its impact varies by context. It appears most effective in low- to moderate-arousal scenarios and may be less critical in highly affective VR applications such as anxiety treatments. Practical advancesn such as TTS integration and simplified binaural rendering methods can support the broader use of realistic audiovisual VR environments in psychological research.
Contemporary scholarly discourse on gender-inclusive communication remains predominantly descriptive, often avoiding a systematic critical analysis of its internal contradictions and social consequences. However, the growing social tension around new linguistic norms, their ideologization, and direct impact on public institutions demand unbiased examination. The aim of this article is to identify and analyze the key paradoxes generated by gender-inclusive communication, which persist despite its proclaimed goals of equality and respect. The research material comprises English-language texts of various genres and styles, including scholarly articles, media publications, documents from university websites, healthcare institutions, governmental, non-governmental, and commercial organizations, as well as data from blogs and social networks from the period 2017 to 2025. This allowed us to examine gender-inclusive communication both in the sphere of academic reflection and within the context of public practice. The methodological framework is based on critical discourse analysis, which interprets linguistic changes as a struggle for power, and Lotman’s theory of the semiosphere, which views inclusive language as a phenomenon of cultural dynamics. The study establishes that inclusive communication generates a complex of systemic contradictions across different dimensions: linguistic (between the striving to erase and simultaneously multiply gender differences, leading to semantic tautology and a violation of linguistic conventionality); social (where inclusivity in practice becomes a tool for excluding dissenting voices and marginalizing the experiences of traditional groups); ethical (encompassing the conflict between the ideology of self-identification and biological realities, as well as the imposition of Anglo-centric models onto other linguacultures). Interpreting the results through the chosen methodological lens reveals that inclusive language functions not only as a discourse of power but also as a tool of auto-communication, aimed at redefining the core of the cultural semiosphere and consolidating a “progressive” identity. The findings open perspectives for comparative studies on the reception of inclusive practices in different linguacultures and for interdisciplinary research into the long-term social effects of linguistic reform.
Abstract Mood states strongly influence episodic memory processing, yet the neural mechanisms through which mood interacts with stimulus valence during encoding remain unclear. The present study examined how experimentally induced negative mood would modulate neural processing and behavioural outcomes during an associative memory task, and whether mindfulness intervention can alter these effects. Twenty healthy adults completed a memory-encoding (word-stimulus pairs) task in which mood induction (negative vs. neutral) prior to encoding was crossed with stimulus valence (neutral vs. negative), producing four conditions. Continuous EEG was recorded using a 64-channel system, and event-related potentials (ERPs) and oscillatory dynamics were analysed during stimulus-locked encoding epochs. After an initial retrieval session, participants were randomly assigned to either a brief mindfulness meditation intervention or an active podcast-listening control, followed by a second retrieval session. Our behavioral data indicated that, recognition accuracy, arousal, valence ratings, and confidence differed significantly across conditions. Participants formed stronger word–image associations for neutral than negative stimuli across conditions, with associative memory being most impaired when negative stimuli were encoded during a negative mood state. At the neural level, early perceptual–affective processing showed robust Mood × Valence interactions: central P200 and occipito‑parietal EPN amplitudes differentiated negative from neutral images during neutral mood, but this valence effect was markedly reduced under negative mood, indicating an early blunting of neural sensitivity to emotional content. Following the mindfulness intervention, the negative images encoded under negative mood showed the most pronounced reduction in arousal, along with heightened alpha activity during mediation. Together, these findings show that negative mood undermines associative binding and influences early stages of visual-affective processing, while mindfulness may primarily positively influence the associated affective responses.
On August 29, 2023, the Municipal Authority of Milan (Italy) issued official guidelines promoting the use of gender-equal language in administrative communication. These measures aim not only to introduce new prescriptive linguistic norms but also to reshape the social representation of women by eliminating stereotypes considered incompatible with contemporary society. While acknowledging that the use of the feminine definite article la (the) before women’s surnames is common and acceptable in spoken Italian, the guidelines explicitly discourage its use in written language, arguing that an equivalent practice does not apply to men and that inclusive language should treat both genders identically. Adopting a qualitative case study methodology, this research examines a corpus of Italian press articles to determine whether this language policy has influenced journalistic practices regarding the use of the feminine definite article preceding women’s surnames. The findings reveal that la continues to be widely employed by Italian journalists, as it fulfills essential linguistic functions related to semantic clarity, gender distinction, phonetic balance, and grammatical accuracy. Its use does not convey discrimination or negative evaluation; rather, it linguistically marks female identity and differentiates women from their male counterparts in a transparent and structured manner. The study further contends that this regulatory intervention conflicts with the principle that language evolves organically as a result of usage, rather than being shaped by top-down institutional regulation. From this perspective, the guidelines reflect the ideological orientation of the progressive left-wing political forces currently governing the city of Milan, alongside the influence of transfeminist advocacy groups engaged in shaping contemporary language policies.
Pronouns indicate significant importance in both pedagogical and communicative contexts, as they shape the way individuals are addressed and understood in social interactions and educational settings. Beyond the traditional pronouns “he” and “she,” the American Psychological Association endorses the scholarly use of the singular pronoun “they,” recognizing its relevance in promoting inclusive language practices. In addition, the popularity of neopronouns continues to rise, providing non-binary individuals with a broader range of linguistic options to express their identities. Despite this growing recognition, there remains a dearth of empirical research that systematically investigates the awareness, knowledge, and preferences regarding pronoun use among non-binary populations. Addressing this gap, the present quantitative inquiry examined the level of awareness, knowledge, and preference of pronouns among non-binary college students at a state university in the Philippines. The study involved 80 participants, including 20 lesbians, 20 gays, 20 bisexual males, and 20 bisexual females, selected through criterion sampling, who responded to a four-part researcher-developed survey questionnaire. The results indicate that, overall, non-binary college students are aware of the categories of pronouns (M=2.48, SD=0.39 for traditional pronouns; M=2.79, SD=0.25 for gender-neutral pronouns; and M=2.64, SD=0.32 for neopronouns) and knowledgeable about them (M=2.49, SD=0.31 for traditional pronouns; M=2.68, SD=0.23 for gender-neutral pronouns; and M=2.47, SD=0.32 for neopronouns). However, despite this awareness and knowledge, participants expressed a preference for using traditional pronouns (“he” and “she”) when being referred to. These findings underscore the persistence of traditional linguistic norms in educational settings and highlight the potential influence of formal language instruction on pronoun preference. Empirically, this study contributes to the limited body of research on non-binary pronoun use speficically in the Philippines, providing a foundational dataset that can inform inclusive language policies, pedagogical strategies, and future sociolinguistic investigations. Its significance lies not only in documenting patterns of pronoun awareness and preference but also in offering evidence-based insights for educators, policymakers, and advocates seeking to foster more inclusive and affirming learning environments.
Past research has shown that contextual renewal of conditional fear can be reduced if unconditional stimuli (USs) are presented unpaired with the conditional stimuli (CSs) during extinction training. The current study examined whether this reduction is a product of strengthened extinction learning from the unpaired presentation of the stimuli that had been paired during acquisition or from habituation to the US. Three groups of participants completed extinction training in a novel context with either: (1) CSs only (CS alone), (2) CSs and unpaired USs (unpaired), or (3) USs only (US alone) presentations. Based on past literature, contextual renewal of electrodermal responses was expected to occur in the CS alone group and renewal of US expectancy in the CS alone and US alone groups. Renewal was absent in electrodermal responses across all groups, limiting interpretation. US expectancy renewal emerged in the CS alone and US alone groups but not in the unpaired group, due to an unexpected increase in US expectancy during CS- in the unpaired extinction phase. This increase, along with parallel changes in affective ratings, suggests that the unpaired group perceived both CS+ and CS- as paired with the US. Taken together, the current findings provided limited support for the effectiveness of unpaired extinction in reducing the return of fear and highlight the role of participants' subjective interpretation of events. US alone extinction showed limited effectiveness, likely due to the high number of US presentations, with some evidence of US habituation.
Endangered Hausa dialects spoken in Jigawa State and selected communities in Kano, Katsina, and Yobe States represent an irreplaceable repository of cultural and linguistic heritage, yet these varieties are diminishing at an accelerating rate under the pressure of urbanisation, formal education in Standard Hausa, and mass media. This paper reports the principal findings of a linguistic documentation project that conducted the first systematic digital preservation of nine endangered Hausa dialect varieties across the four-state study region. Using a linguistic documentation research design, the project engaged 120 native speaker participants distributed across three age cohorts and nine dialect communities. Data were collected through 84 hours of audio and video recording, semi-structured interviews, participant observation, GPS-based dialect mapping, and systematic metadata documentation. Linguistic analysis produced annotated transcriptions of all recordings, a lexical database of 1,850 entries including 342 dialect-only lexical items, a phonological description of 24 unique tone contrasts and 18 distinct vowel patterns, 216 documented proverbs, and 68 dialect-specific kinship terms. A digital archive of 120 gigabytes was created following UNESCO and Endangered Language Documentation Programme standards. Language vitality assessment using the UNESCO framework revealed that six of the nine documented varieties score at or below the 3.0 endangered threshold, with Guri dialect critically endangered at 2.1. Mean young adult dialect use rates average 36 percent of elderly speaker rates, confirming severe intergenerational transmission failure. The study proposes a three-phase Digital Preservation Framework and offers evidence-based recommendations for language policy, curriculum design, and institutional capacity building in Nigerian Hausa dialect documentation.
Currently, East Asia, especially South Korea, is facing social problems such as population decline and regional inequality. To address these challenges, tourism has been leveraged as a means of economic revitalization, especially in fishing villages that are economically disadvantaged. This study examined the authentic food experiences of tourists who visited fishing villages. Tourists’ food experiences, dimensions of destination food image, and destination loyalty were assessed. In September 2024, 448 responses from Korean tourists were collected and analyzed using confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling to test 15 hypotheses. Local food authenticity showed a significant effect on all dimensions of destination food image. Of the five dimensions of destination food image in this study, food taste, health and hygiene, and unique cultural experiences significantly influenced destination loyalty. In addition, geographic differences moderated the relationship between local marine food authenticity and the perceived food image of the destination. Tourists in the southern coastal regions reported the highest destination food image ratings, driven by authentic local cuisine, while those in the western regions reported the lowest. This study offers both practical and theoretical implications related to sustainable coastal tourism.
The article provides a comprehensive analysis of inconsistencies and variations observed in the orthographic norms of compound words in the modern Kazakh language. The research material consists of 54 lexical items, including 18 names of animals, 12 names of plants, 14 medical terms, and 10 words representing diverse semantic and morphological models. The study employs comparative analysis, phonetic-pattern analysis, structural-morphological and semantic modeling, as well as a comparative examination of orthographic dictionaries and normative reference sources. The findings reveal that approximately 30% of the compound words under consideration appear in two or more parallel written forms across different orthographic dictionaries and reference publications. Major problematic areas of Kazakh orthography identified in the study include the inconsistent application of vowel harmony rules, the lack of reflection of phonetic assimilation in writing, discrepancies between pronunciation and orthographic representation, the violation of morphological integrity, and the presence of unsystematic spelling patterns in the names of animals, plants, and medical terms. The results underscore the necessity of revising the spelling conventions of compound words in accordance with the internal linguistic laws of Kazakh, its natural phonetic structure, and its agglutinative nature. The conclusions presented in the article hold practical significance for the development of orthographic rules based on the new alphabet, the updating of orthographic dictionaries, and the scientific justification of orthographic directions within state language policy
In this article it will explore the relationship between pragmatics and word meaning with a focus on Modern English, and how meaning is influenced not only by grammatical form, but also by context, speaker intention, and social interaction. Whereas traditional semantics considers meaning as a stable property of words and sentences, pragmatics emphasizes that meaning is negotiated in actual communicative contexts. The paper takes as its goal to provide a close analysis of such critical pragmatic concepts as context, deixis, implicature, presupposition, and speech acts, showing how those ideas influence the interpretation of lexical meaning in everyday communication. One point of particular focus with which he brings attention is that of dynamic word meanings in modern English—most especially in digital discourse, media, and intercultural communication. The study shows that understanding word meaning demands not just dictionary definitions but an understanding also of norms and attitudes in society, one's cultural background, and of communicative aims—often based upon examples from actual usage. The relative importance of pragmatics in explaining implicit meanings of speakers, and how listeners interpret them successfully. In an attempt to establish a conclusion, the article argues that pragmatics is a defining factor and is relevant in modern English through word meanings; pragmatics is one of the major theories in both modernism and modern Western English which is needed for efficient communication, linguistic analysis etc.
Building on evidence for experience-specific grounding of word meaning and interindividual differences therein, this study investigated how specific aspects of empathy modulate the processing and representation of abstract emotional words. We investigated single-trial N400 amplitudes as a measure of semantic retrieval in 78 healthy adults during a delayed lexical decision task with emotion-label, emotion-laden, and neutral abstract words. We further measured the participants' levels of empathic concern, fantasy, personal distress, and perspective taking. Additionally, ratings on valence, arousal, and emotional experience quantified the words' emotional representational content. While direct comparison yielded no evidence for N400 differences between word types, N400 amplitudes in response to emotion-label words decreased with increasing fantasy scores, with this modulation being stronger than for emotion-laden and neutral words. Additionally, participants with higher fantasy scores rated emotional words higher in absolute valence. The observed N400 reductions thus seem to reflect fantasy-driven processing facilitation graded by the words' emotionality level. In contrast, we found no evidence for N400 modulations by empathic concern, personal distress, or perspective taking while affective ratings on all scales increased with increasing empathic concern scores. Our findings suggest that fantasy facilitates emotion-label word processing, and empathic concern enriches emotional word meaning representations, demonstrating interindividual differences in the experiential grounding of emotional abstract concepts.
<sec> <title>UNSTRUCTURED</title> Generic sentiment analysis tools are widely deployed in digital mental health and longitudinal text research to infer psychological change. Lexicon-based approaches (eg, NRC), supervised emotion classifiers (eg, GoEmotions), and single-shot large language model (LLM) prompts typically operationalize affect as the frequency or probability of valenced tokens at the message level. While effective for detecting overt affective shifts, the limits of this operationalization remain underexamined. This Viewpoint presents a single-subject longitudinal corpus (n=531 reflective messages across six months) to illustrate a construct–measurement misalignment. The subject reported a substantial psychological transformation characterized by reframing, integration, and narrative restructuring rather than shifts in emotional tone. Phase A (lexicon counts), Phase B (supervised emotion probabilities), and Phase C (LLM affect ratings) were applied under standardized aggregation schemes (per-message scoring, arithmetic mean, binning). Across methods, no consistent longitudinal trend emerged in affective indices. We argue that this null result is not a failure of AI per se, but a measurement blind spot: when transformation occurs at the level of narrative meaning rather than valence frequency, generic sentiment tools may remain insensitive. We propose a construct-specific analytic framework emphasizing alignment between psychological target constructs and computational operationalization. Implications are discussed for responsible deployment of AI in longitudinal digital health and narrative analysis contexts. </sec>
Adequate recovery and habituation to acute stressors in daily life are essential for mental health. One potential moderator might be the use of different emotion regulation (ER) strategies contributing to interindividual differences in vulnerability to chronic stress. Rumination has been linked to impaired endocrine adaptation, whereas reappraisal tendencies have been associated with boosted habituation to psychosocial stress. Yet, no experimental study has directly compared the causal effects of these strategies on psychoneuroendocrine responses to repeated stress. To address this gap, 91 healthy participants (47 women) underwent a short Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) twice on two consecutive days and were randomly assigned to a rumination, reappraisal, or control intervention in between. Cognitive-affective ratings indexed psychological stress, while salivary cortisol, alpha-amylase (sAA), and heart rate (HR) served as biomarkers. Across the entire sample, reduced increases in negative affect and cortisol in response to the second TSST confirmed successful habituation. As expected, rumination immediately increased negative affect, reduced positive affect, and lowered perceived coping abilities indicating successful induction of ruminative thinking. Moreover, it prevented physiological habituation to repeated stress, evidenced by stable cortisol and HR responses. Unexpectedly, reappraisal also lowered perceived coping abilities in men, followed by prolonged sAA reactivity to the first stress exposure, hinting at a sex-specific impairing effect of reappraisal on noradrenergic recovery. However, reappraisal neither affected cortisol recovery nor habituation, which may result from generally poor reappraisal performance. Together, these findings provide initial evidence for differential effects of rumination and reappraisal on psychophysiological adaptations to repeated TSST exposure.
Our brain maps the space immediately surrounding the body, the peripersonal space (PPS), to sharpen sensory-motor coordination whenever an object enters it. Within PPS, past research demonstrated how several factors influence motor readiness: from stimulus characteristics, such as body-object distance and stimulus semantics, to personality traits like anxiety. However, most paradigms infer PPS boundaries using tactile and visual stimuli, with auditory cues often playing an ancillary role, rather than directly measuring response modulation to stimuli entering the PPS. Here, we measured anticipatory postural adjustments, as direct physiological indices of motor planning, to examine whether semantic content and individual suggestibility modulate responses to looming sounds stopping within PPS. Thirty-three adults heard affective semantic sounds (positive - applause, negative - dentist drill) or neutral non-semantic (pink noise) sounds halting at five within-PPS distances while we recorded muscle activation timing, distance estimates, affective ratings, and sensory suggestibility. Motor responses were faster as sounds stopped nearer the body but systematically delayed and less precise for semantic sounds compared to non-semantic sounds, with higher suggestibility predicting longer and more variable latencies, particularly for non-semantic sounds. These findings demonstrate that semantic evaluation imposes measurable processing costs that systematically delay motor preparation and increase perceived distance. Individual suggestibility produces freeze-like response patterns that amplify motor uncertainty, specifically when semantic context is absent, revealing distinct cognitive and trait-based mechanisms that jointly regulate defensive behaviour within PPS.
This article attempts to explain the mechanism of cultural-artistic signification in relation to linguistic structures, cultural codes, and the interpretive processes of the audience. The main research question is to what extent the meaning of artistic and cultural works resides within the text or artifact itself, and to what extent it emerges and is reproduced through the interaction between language, culture, and the audience. Despite the expansion of semiotic, linguistic, and hermeneutic studies, a coherent theoretical framework that can simultaneously, interactively, and recursively explain these three levels is still lacking. Accordingly, this article aims to propose a conceptual three-layered model for explaining the production and reproduction of cultural-artistic meaning. In this model, the first layer is devoted to linguistic and semiotic structures, including lexical choices, syntactic organization, metaphor, narrative, and expressive patterns, which provide the initial foundation for signification. The second layer concerns cultural codes, values, norms, and cultural memory, which organize the horizon of understanding and the semantic field of the work. The third layer pertains to the role of the audience and the interpretive process, where lived experience, prior knowledge, worldview, and the horizon of expectation intervene in the actualization of meaning. The research method is theoretical-analytical, based on the synthesis of key concepts from semiotics, socio-cultural linguistics, and theories of interpretation. The main finding of the article is that cultural-artistic signification is not a fixed, immanent (within the text) matter, but rather a dynamic, multi-layered process produced through the interaction among linguistic structures, cultural codes, and the interpretive act of the audience, and is continuously reproduced within social and historical contexts. Consequently, language is not merely a tool of expression, but one of the foundational organizers of signification; however, meaning is actualized only in connection with culture and the audience. From this perspective, the proposed model can provide a theoretical framework for analyzing literary texts, artistic works, and cultural phenomena across historical and intercultural contexts.
Background: Aromatherapy has been proposed as a non-pharmacological adjunctive intervention in critical care settings; however, evidence regarding its effects on objective outcome measures remains inconclusive. This systematic review aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of aromatherapy in modulating objective physiological and biochemical markers in adult intensive care unit (ICU) patients. We hypothesized that the controlled ICU environment would facilitate rigorous measurement of both physiological parameters and biochemical stress markers. Methods: A systematic search was conducted using a novel approach combining lexical database searching (PubMed) and AI-powered semantic search strategies (Elicit, Undermind). Randomized controlled trials examining aromatherapy effects on physiological parameters in critically ill and cardiac patients were included. Outcomes were categorized as cardiovascular, respiratory, and non-cardiovascular/non-respiratory parameters. Subgroup analyses were performed by essential oil type. Results: Eighteen studies comprising 1236 participants were included. Aromatherapy demonstrated moderate effects on cardiovascular parameters (systolic blood pressure: 50% success rate, 5-22 mmHg reductions; diastolic blood pressure: 50%, 3.7-14 mmHg; heart rate: 44%, up to 20 bpm) but limited effects on respiratory parameters (respiratory rate: 25%; peripheral oxygen saturation: 12.5%), with the exception of eucalyptus oil, which showed 75% success for respiratory outcomes in mechanically ventilated patients. Non-cardiovascular/non-respiratory outcomes demonstrated the highest efficacy: anxiety (86%), sleep quality (100%), pain (100%), and sedation outcomes (100%). Subgroup analysis revealed essential oil blends achieved superior cardiovascular and psychological outcomes (100%) compared to lavender alone (64% cardiovascular; 71% anxiety/sedation). Contrary to our hypothesis, no studies measured biochemical stress markers such as cortisol or catecholamines, representing a significant gap in the evidence base. A notable finding was the disparity between evidence certainty: high for anxiety reduction versus low/very low for physiological outcomes, highlighting inadequate control for ICU-specific confounders in existing trials. Conclusion: Aromatherapy may serve as a safe adjunctive intervention in critically ill patients, with potential cardiovascular benefits requiring cautious interpretation and strong effects on anxiety and sleep outcomes. The absence of biochemical outcome measurements and inadequate control for ICU-specific confounders limits mechanistic understanding and causal inference.
Kutaisi historical-ethnographic museum is rich with its manuscripts, and the manuscript is the national treasure. We are going to analyze a prayer book (# 365), which author is Iona Gedevanishvili. The prayer book with the size of 15X105, written on paper, bound in the embossed leather cover, written in Mxedruli, titles in red ink, the monument of the II half of the XIX century, incomplete and damaged, comes from Akhvlediani’s famiily. Specific linguistic norms characteristic to average Georgian was expected in the manuscript. The ancient Georgian norms prevail in it. Scribe is fluent and to put it into practice is not hard to find, and the influence of the Modern Georgian that was not inculcated is still strong. Лексические анализ рукописи сохраняет в Кутаиси музей.
<div> This paper examines register variation in Latin from the third century BCE to the fourteenth century CE using Key Feature Analysis (KFA) (Egbert and Biber, 2023), a quantitative method for identifying statistically over-and underrepresented linguistic features. Registers are defined as text varieties linked to communicative situations and characterized by distributions of lexico-grammatical features (Biber, 1988, 1995). Six dependency-parsed Universal Dependencies (UD) treebanks are classified a priori into ten register categories based on established scholarship. Additionally, Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is used to reduce dimensionality, in order to explore the texts major patterns of variation and clusters of linguistically similar texts. KFA reveals systematic register-specific grammatical profiles consistent with previous research (e.g. Biber (2014b)). Registers with involved language use (e.g. letters and speeches) show higher frequencies of personal reference and engagement, while philosophical texts favor subordination and impersonal constructions. Registers containing narrative elements (e.g. historiography, satire) contain high frequency of verbs in past tense. PCA places the charter register into a distinct cluster, while other registers form more closely grouped patterns. The strongest components reflect contrasts in number, aspect, tense and person, alongside subordination and cordination distributions. The results are largely confirmatory: KFA produces coherent and interpretable groupings of grammatical features consistent with previous findings, providing a proof of concept for quantitative register analysis in historical corpora. Data and code are openly available for future research. </div>
Prediction systems grounded in textual data have become indispensable across high-stakes domains including clinical decision support, financial signal detection, and digital misinformation analysis. Classical statistical approaches and shallow machine learning methods have demonstrated satisfactory performance on narrow, well-curated datasets, but they struggle to generalise once input distributions shift or domain vocabulary diverges from training corpora. Deep learning, and more specifically the pre-trained transformer paradigm, has substantially narrowed this gap; nevertheless, single-architecture solutions routinely leave accuracy on the table when applied to tasks that demand both rich contextual encoding and explicit sequential reasoning. This paper presents a cohesive, end-to-end AI- powered prediction framework that fuses BERT- derived contextual representations with a two-layer bidirectional LSTM (BiLSTM) classification head augmented by an additive attention mechanism. The system is designed as a modular pipeline: text acquisition and normalisation, augmentation-based imbalance handling, deep encoding, sequential modelling, and post-hoc probability calibration are treated as independent, replaceable stages. Experimental evaluation across three publicly available benchmark datasets — the LIAR fake news corpus, Stanford Sentiment Treebank v2, and a health-claim verification collection — confirms that the hybrid BERT-BiLSTM-Attention architecture outperforms five competitive baselines on macro-averaged F1 and area under the ROC curve. Ablation experiments quantify the individual contributions of the attention layer, recurrent head, augmentation strategy, and temperature scaling. A discussion of deployment trade-offs addresses inference latency, continual adaptation, and algorithmic fairness..
BACKGROUND AND AIMS: Cannabis cue reactivity paradigms are instrumental in studying the behavioral and neurocognitive mechanisms of cannabis use and cannabis use disorders; however, image sets used for cannabis cue reactivity paradigms vary between studies, and the lack of reliability and validity assessment hinders the quality of evidence they generate. The main aim of this study was to create a novel, open access, standardized and representative database of cannabis use-related images including control images matched by resolution, luminosity and complexity: The Cannabis Research Image Database (CRESIDA). The secondary aim was to examine whether subjective cannabis cue-induced craving was associated with cannabis use severity and whether this relationship was moderated by image type. As an illustrative example of how our open data can be used and how sample characteristics can shape cue reactivity, we also explored the role of cannabis-tobacco mixing by comparing cannabis cue induced cannabis and tobacco craving between individuals who did and did not mix the substances. DESIGN: An online survey was administered to participants recruited via online platforms, community advertisement and snowballing. SETTING: USA, the Netherlands and Australia. PARTICIPANTS/CASES: 689 participants who consumed cannabis monthly to daily (385 men, 298 women, 6 other) were recruited between January 2022 and May 2024. MEASUREMENTS: Out of 93 cannabis images and 93 matched neutral images, participants each rated 31 image pairs for cannabis craving (the primary outcome), arousal, valence and tobacco craving. Participants were characterized for socio-demographic data, level of cannabis use and related problems and mixing cannabis and tobacco. A subset of 78 images was selected for further analysis based on cannabis craving results. Image ratings were evaluated for internal consistency (α). Furthermore, we examined the association between cannabis cravings and cannabis use characteristics, and explored if cannabis craving ratings were affected by image type (i.e. product, paraphernalia and actions) and by using cannabis alone vs. mixing cannabis and tobacco. FINDINGS: The database showed excellent reliability (α = 0.995-0.965). Cannabis craving, valence and arousal discriminated cannabis and control images. More cannabis use days [unstandardized beta (β) = 0.162, P < 0.001] and cannabis use-related problems (β = 0.268, P < 0.001) were statistically significantly associated with higher image-related cannabis craving. Mixing cannabis with tobacco, compared with using cannabis alone, was associated with the presence of tobacco craving in relation to cannabis images, and with greater cannabis craving in relation to cannabis images (β = -0.457, P < 0.001). CONCLUSIONS: Images in the open access Cannabis Research Image Database (CRESIDA, https://osf.io/dc9nz/) appear to be reliable and valid for the scientific study of cue reactivity internationally, providing a broad range of free to use cannabis and control images.
<h3>Introduction</h3> Ancient Chinese WordNet <a href="../../../LDC2026L03">(LDC2026L03)</a> was developed by <a href="https://www.njnu.edu.cn/">Nanjing Normal University</a> and contains lexical and semantic information for Ancient Chinese vocabulary dating back to the Pre-Qin period (before 221 BCE). The WordNet comprises 38,781 word forms and 55,100 senses, each manually linked to a corresponding synset in <a href="https://wordnet.princeton.edu/">Princeton WordNet 1.6</a>. The Ancient Chinese WordNet (ACWN) project began in 2012 with the goal of creating a structured lexical database to support linguistic research and natural language processing applications involving historical Chinese language materials. ACWN organizes vocabulary using WordNet's noun, verb, adjective, and adverb hierarchies and provides WordNet definitions, semantic relations, and categorization for each sense. <h3>Data</h3> Ancient Chinese WordNet contains 55,100 records, where each record represents a single Ancient Chinese lexical item mapped to one WordNet synset. It follows WordNet 1.6 organizational structure, including 22 noun categories, 15 verb categories, and additional adjective and adverb categories. Each entry includes the following fields: <ul> <li>ID - The serial number of the ACWN entry</li> <li>Word - Ancient Chinese word form</li> <li>wn_offset - 8-digit WordNet 1.6 synset offset with trailing POS (n/v/a/s/r)</li> <li>senseid - Sense number for this word form (ordinal among that word's senses)</li> <li>pos - Part of speech (noun (n), verb (v), adj (a/s), adv (r))</li> <li>wn_category - Numeric code for the WordNet 1.6 lexicographer file (category)</li> <li>wn_synset - Synset headword(s) in WordNet 1.6</li> <li>wn_definition - WordNet gloss for the synset</li> <li>wn_similar to - Synset with similar meaning</li> <li>wn_pertainym - Pertainym synset offset(s)</li> <li>wn_attribute - Attribute synset offset(s)</li> <li>wn_hypernym - Hypernym synset offset(s)</li> <li>wn_hyponym - Hyponym synset offset(s)</li> </ul> The data is presented in UTF-8 encoded CSV and XLSX formats. <h3>Updates</h3> No updates at this time.
This dataset contains multimodal neuroimaging and physiological data from a study investigating the effects of Targeted Memory Reactivation (TMR) during REM sleep on emotional reactivity. Participants encoded affective images paired with sounds, received auditory cues during subsequent REM sleep, and were rescanned 48 hours later during arousal rating tasks in an fMRI scanner. The dataset includes structural and functional MRI, polysomnographic recordings with EEG during sleep, heart rate measurements, and behavioral ratings across three sessions spanning two weeks.
The rapid development of large language model technology has evolved machine translation from a low-level tool into a cultural transmission vehicle with semantic understanding capabilities, shifting the relationship between artificial intelligence and human translators from one of substitution to one of collaboration.Employing Translator Behavior Criticism theory and comparative analysis, this study systematically analyzes the behavioral characteristics of student translators and multi-model machine translators across the two dimensions of "truth-seeking" and "utility-attaining," revealing the differential patterns between human and machine translators in three aspects: semantic fidelity, cultural adaptability, and audience orientation.The findings indicate: 1) Student translators demonstrate stronger subjectivity in terms of cultural awareness and ideological expression, enabling a deeper grasp of the philosophical connotations and value orientation of terminology; 2) Machine translators hold significant advantages in lexical innovation and adaptation to linguistic norms, yet exhibit notable limitations in understanding complex rhetorical structures and cultural metaphors; 3) Humanmachine collaborative pathways can achieve a more optimal balance of tension between preserving Chinese characteristics and achieving international accessibility, forming a bidirectional enhancement effect characterized by "complementarity between truth-seeking and innovation, and integration of utility-attaining and flexibility"; 4) A collaborative translation system requires the construction of a three-tier progressive mechanism of "multi-model inspiration-in-depth student revision-expert feedback optimization" to realize the organic unity of cultural confidence and international communication.
This dataset contains respondent-level records from on-site soundscape surveys of urban public space in two Chinese cities, collected under the ISO/TS 12913-2:2018 Method A protocol between 2018 and 2025. It covers 2,821 questionnaires from 13 public spaces — parks, green spaces and civic squares — 12 in Shenyang, Liaoning Province and one in Changshu, Jiangsu Province. Each record holds soundscape perception (eight perceived affective qualities with ISO pleasantness-eventfulness coordinates, overall evaluation, appropriateness, perceived loudness and four sound-source dominance ratings), four perceived-restorativeness items, visit behaviour and social context, demographics and the WHO-5 Well-Being Index. While each respondent answered, one minute of binaural audio was recorded beside them; per-channel acoustic and psychoacoustic indicators (LAeq and percentile levels, Zwicker loudness, sharpness, roughness, fluctuation strength and tonality) are included, together with 150 photo semantic-segmentation area shares describing the visual context of most records. The workbook carries two data sheets — the corrected 2,373-record analysis table used by the associated articles on well-being and age differences, and the full settled 2018-2025 table — plus an SSID protocol codebook, an English variable dictionary and per-site coverage notes. Version 2 corrects 45 site labels, sound-source ratings on 105 records and one WHO-5 record against the original questionnaires, and adds the restorativeness, acoustic-indicator and visual-context variables.
Abstract The International Affective Picture System (IAPS) is an extremely valuable resource and among the most widely used stimulus databases. Notably lacking though are separate measures for positive and negative emotion. Thus, researchers cannot distinguish images that evoke a neutral affective state from those that evoke both positive and negative emotion. Further, IAPS ratings are not provided for racial or ethnic groups, leaving it unclear how different groups respond. The current study aimed to aid in image selection by providing information beyond what is currently available. In Study 1, we tested the effects of the Self-Assessment Manikin, a 9-point, pictorial scale used to make the original normative IAPS ratings ( N = 115). When the visual scale was used, ratings were lower and had a restricted range, compared to use of a non-visual, Likert-type, 9-point scale. In Study 2 ( N = 1061), using this non-visual scale, we surveyed a racially and ethnically diverse sample. We provide mean ratings for positive emotion, negative emotion, and arousal, as well as an emotional categorization for each image (positive, negative, or no emotion). Ratings are provided by gender and for Hispanic/Latino/a, East Asian, Southeast Asian, and White, non-Hispanic groups as well as for the combined sample. Preliminary analyses show some group differences in ratings (e.g., East Asian > Hispanic for negative and arousal ratings for one cluster of images), suggesting that demographic variables are related to ratings. The ultimate goal of the current project is to facilitate advances in affective science by providing additional information about IAPS to improve stimuli selection.
The study analyzes decorative texts from a linguistic-axiological perspective. The relevance of the research is explained by the wide spread of textualized objects of reality in the modern linguistic space. The aim is to analyze the axiological parameters of Russian decorative texts and identify the dominant values in the axiological sphere of the collective consciousness of contemporary Russian society. The study material included Russian decorative texts written on clothing, cars, bento cakes, gifts, disposable coffee cups, jewelry, and interior design. The value parameterization was conducted with the help of methods of linguisticaxiological interpretation, definition analysis, and conceptual analysis of key words. As a result, decorative texts have been proved to be a new form of the language on objects of reality, alongside with study and electronic media; such texts function as catalysts of value meanings in the modern linguistic space. I-mentality as a predominant model of self-identification of the linguistic personality has been identified. This is determined by the inherent self-presentational function of decorative texts and by the expansion of mass culture with self-promotion as its norm. It has been found that deliberate violation of linguistic norms distorts axiological norms and offsets value meanings, which are displaced by simulacra. The following axiological parameters of Russian-language decorative texts have been established: the importance of material values, a hedonistic world perception, and egoistic, assertive, and antisocial behavior. The prospects for the research lie in expanding the corpus of Russian decorative texts to enhance the objectivity of linguistic-axiological analysis and in studying the axiologemes of Russian decorative texts in the form of aphoristic statements.
FrameNet is an English-based lexical database that shows how words are used by providing information as to which participants and relations are evoked by a certain concept. Recent efforts toward a multilingual FrameNet have not targeted either ancient languages or different historical stages of the same language. In our paper we propose creating a multilingual FrameNet for Ancient Indo-European languages starting with a set of 80 verb meanings annotated in the Pavia Verb Database. Our pilot study includes four verb meanings: RAIN, THUNDER, SEE, LOOK AT. As the adequacy of the semantic frames developed for English turns out not to be appropriate for the languages in our sample, we propose two new frames that can account for the analyzed data.
Arabic WordNet 4.0 is a comprehensive lexical database for Modern Standard Arabic, derived from the Open English WordNet 2024 using the expand approach. Features:120,630 synsets (full OEWN 2024 parity)136,041 lexical entries184,238 senses297,150 synset relations (0 skipped — exact parity with OEWN 2024)97.3% ILI coverage for cross-linguistic linkingFull WN-LMF 1.4 XML format complianceAll synsets include Arabic definitions with full tashkeel (diacritical marks) on lemmas What's new in v4.1.0:+10,720 satellite adjectives (pos=s) — completing full OEWN 2024 adjective coverage+9 missing hub verbs (act/move, change, travel, make, communicate, and others)+78 upper-ontology noun synsets completing the noun hierarchyAll 8 validation checks pass against OEWN 2024 Methodology:Initial 109,823 synsets (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs) were generated using AI-assisted translation (Google Gemini 3 Pro Preview). The remaining 10,807 synsets (satellite adjectives, hub verbs, upper-ontology nouns) were translated using Anthropic Claude via an automated Docker pipeline. Attribution:Derived from Open English WordNet 2024 (https://en-word.net/) and Princeton WordNet 3.0 (https://wordnet.princeton.edu/), both licensed under CC BY 4.0.
This study presents a sociolinguistic and lexical analysis of the discourse particle “aw” among Thai speakers, focusing on its pragmatic functions and social variation. Using a qualitative, survey-based design with 30 participants, it examines how “aw” is used in online and face-to-face communication. Findings show that “aw” functions primarily as an expression of emotional response and empathy in informal peer interaction, while being context-sensitive and typically avoided in formal or hierarchical settings. The study highlights its role as a pragmatic softening strategy and its relevance for foreign teachers in interpreting Thai conversational norms.
The Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) is one of the most widely used tools for measuring affect along the dimensions of valence and arousal, yet its abstract humanoid icons have been criticized for ambiguity, especially in representing arousal, and for lacking full gender neutrality. Despite newer alternatives, challenges remain in achieving clarity, inclusivity, and dimensional precision. To address this, we developed the Weather-Based Emotion Reporting (WER), a visual digital scale that represents affective states using familiar weather scenes. Grounded in normative affective data, WER was constructed to systematically map weather imagery onto the valence-arousal circumplex. In a within-subjects online experiment (N = 100), participants rated affective words using either WER or the SAM, allowing comparison of convergent validity, reaction times, and subjective usability.WER demonstrated a strong convergence with SAM, particularly for valence, while arousal showed moderate and more variable agreement, replicating well-documented asymmetry between affective dimensions. Reaction time analyses showed that WER responses were slightly faster than SAM responses, although the effect size was small. Participants consistently preferred WER, reporting greater clarity, comfort, and ease of use. Visual complexity analyses confirmed that WER and SAM differ qualitatively in their visual structure. Complementary image-complexity analyses highlighted the role of visual richness as a contextual factor in affective reporting. Together, these findings support WER as a valid and intuitive alternative to traditional schematic affective rating tools, particularly for communicating valence while maintaining comparable performance for arousal, and suggest that ecologically grounded visual metaphors may address some limitations of existing instruments.
With the increasing popularity and feasibility of implementing Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA), research on affective dynamics has expanded considerably (1–3). In parallel, advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have enabled scalable extraction of rich multimodal features (e.g., facial, vocal, and linguistic) from video data, which may serve as adjunct complementary behavioural indicators to subjective ratings of affective states typically captured in EMAs. Emerging research has demonstrated the promising utility of these features in predicting the diagnostic status of mental health problems and the presence of transdiagnostic symptomology (4–6). However, how these behavioural indicators relate to momentary affect in naturalistic settings, and whether they explain unique variance in mental health symptoms beyond self-reported mood, remains unexplored. Given the recent rise in perinatal depression and anxiety (7), exploring these questions in the perinatal period will inform the potential clinical value of implementing naturalistic video screeners of postpartum mental health symptoms in perinatal care provision. The present study therefore has two primary aims: 1) to examine the extent to which multimodal behavioural indicators map onto momentary affect ratings across a one-week EMA protocol (3 pings daily) in birthing parents who are 1-6 months postpartum; 2) to test whether behavioural indicators explain variance in mental health symptoms above and beyond self-reported momentary mood, thereby evaluating their incremental validity as markers of emotional functioning.
The Darbest dataset is a Universal Dependencies (UD) treebank dataset for Standard Sorani Kurdish written in the Perso-Arabic script. It contains 69,000 annotated sentences and 1,205,855 tokens collected from nine textual domains. The corpus was collected from seven Kurdish online news websites and supplemented with texts from published books. Before preprocessing, the collected corpus contained 1,250,275 words from 5,627 web pages together with book-based texts and was preprocessed using a Python-based pipeline involving text cleaning, Unicode and punctuation normalization, sentence segmentation, and tokenization. The dataset was developed to provide a large-scale syntactically and morphologically annotated resource for Standard Sorani Kurdish. A separate 100-sentence gold-standard set was manually annotated according to the Universal Dependencies v2 guidelines. Sorani Kurdish linguistic experts supported the selection of sentences representing diverse and linguistically complex structures and reviewed LLM-generated annotations for errors. The gold-standard set was used to construct few-shot prompts for annotating the remaining corpus. The resulting annotations were represented in the standard CoNLL-U format and validated using the official Universal Dependencies validation tool, followed by manual correction and quality review. The released treebank is divided into training, development, and test sets and includes lemmas, Universal Part-of-Speech (UPOS) tags, morphological features, syntactic heads, and dependency relations. The dataset can be used to train, evaluate, and benchmark NLP models for part-of-speech tagging, lemmatization, morphological analysis, dependency parsing, and related computational linguistics tasks. The accompanying repository also contains the separate 100-sentence gold-standard set, plain-text corpus splits, README documentation, and a dataset statistics spreadsheet.
Abstract Color-evasive language practices and ideologies are central to the creation of clinical spaces as white public spaces, which are inherently dangerous for non-white people. This chapter explores how race, language, and disability are shaped by the color-evasive logic taught to medical students through linguistic practices within autism diagnostic processes. In these color-evasive practices, culture can index race in a socially acceptable way, as it allows individuals to talk about race without talking about race. In this clinical vignette, a Black child’s use of Black linguistic norms is described by the white clinician as being “inappropriate, disruptive, and echolalic.” This is reinforced when the clinician tells his students that scoring an autism diagnostic test is “not about culture, it’s about the response.” The chapter explores how the scoring of the diagnostic test is grounded in the subjective assessment of the clinician administering the test and how they understand the patient’s behavior, which is shaped by underlying anti-Black logics about race, language, and disability. The clinician’s response shows us that despite his production of a color-evasive framework, he perceives and hears the patient as a racialized other. The chapter argues that color-evasive ideologies create white public space where clinicians police non-white bodies and conflate a Black child’s use of Black language with disability.
This study investigates euphemistic expressions in English and Korean together with blessings and wishes in Karakalpak and Korean linguistic traditions, focusing on how language is used to manage sensitivity and express cultural values. It argues that euphemisms function as strategies for mitigating socially delicate meanings, while blessings and wishes serve to reinforce positive interpersonal relations and collective ideals. Despite their different communicative purposes, both rely on indirectness, politeness, and culturally shaped norms of appropriateness. Drawing on perspectives from pragmatics, cognitive linguistics, ethnolinguistics, and speech act theory, the study demonstrates that English primarily employs lexical substitution and metaphorical softening, whereas Korean encodes indirectness more systematically through honorifics and grammatical structures influenced by social hierarchy. By incorporating Karakalpak material, the paper also highlights how blessings reflect shared values such as family unity, continuity, and well-being. Overall, the analysis reveals both universal communicative tendencies and culturally specific patterns, contributing to a deeper understanding of language as a socially embedded and culturally meaningful system.
Research on emotional perception often relies on 2D stimuli or highly affective images, limiting ecological validity. We introduce the Emotional Daily Life Library (E-DLL), a database of 132 rotating 3D everyday objects with comprehensive perceptual, cognitive, and emotional normative ratings. In 52 adults, participants provided dimensional (valence–arousal–dominance) and categorical emotion ratings, alongside assessments of recognition, naming, familiarity, contact, usage, and visual complexity. Personality traits (NEO-FFI) and depressive symptoms (BDI-II) were measured to examine individual differences. Cumulative Link Mixed Models (CLMMs) revealed that valence ratings were negatively influenced by the interaction of Neuroticism and subclinical depressive symptoms. For arousal, higher Neuroticism and Conscientiousness demonstrated marginal positive associations, while dominance ratings were unaffected. Generalized Linear Mixed Models (GLMMs) for categorical labels indicated that while emotional attributions were primarily driven by stimulus properties, traits such as Neuroticism and Extraversion significantly predicted the perception of negative emotions (e.g., Sadness). Spearman correlations identified interrelationships among cognitive and perceptual dimensions, and redundant variables (Contact and Usage) were combined into a composite Object Interaction score. By integrating neutral, immersive 3D stimuli with rich multidimensional annotations, E-DLL provides a controlled and ecologically valid tool for experimental and clinical research. Its applicability includes cognitive training, VR-based interventions, and personalized neurorehabilitation platforms such as NeuroAIreh@b, supporting investigations of affective biases and optimizing daily life–oriented therapeutic interventions. • Introduces E-DLL: 132 everyday 3D objects with cognitive & emotional ratings. • Neutral, low-arousal objects provide ecologically valid stimuli for clinical research. • Personality traits & subclinical depression symptoms modulate neutral object ratings. • Composite metrics and cognitive dimensions enhance object-level characterization. • Supports clinical applications like VR training and personalized interventions.
Generic nouns such as Sache and Ding pose a challenge for semantic annotation due to their referential underspecification and context-dependent meaning. Although frequently classified under categories like {artefact} or {object}, their actual referents often belong to abstract or cognitive domains, as in Der Placeboeffekt ist eines der faszinierendsten Dinge in der Welt der Medizin. Drawing on valency grammar, this study shows that these nouns activate different argument structures depending on their syntagmatic environment, reflecting semantic flexibility and combinatorial variability. Lexical databases such as GalNet or GermaNet frequently assign multiple synsets to these nouns, illustrating their ontological ambiguity. This paper examines whether large language models (LLMs) can replicate this nuanced classification. Using a gold standard corpus annotated by linguists, we implement a two-step prompting strategy —supplying LLMs with predefined semantic tags and contextual windows— to test their performance. The results underscore the limitations of current LLMs in dealing with the lexical underspecification of generic nouns, even when provided with an extended context window. These findings contribute to ongoing discussions on the automation of semantic tagging and point to meaningful ways in which AI systems can complement human expertise in natural language processing tasks.
Abstract:In natural language processing, text segmentation is a crucial task that can be approached in various ways, depending on the level of detail required. Examples include segmenting a document into different topical segments or dividing a sentence into smaller units called elementary discourse units (EDUs). Traditional methods for these tasks relied heavily on carefully crafted features, but they have limitations. SEGBOT is our proposed solution to address these limitations. SEGBOT is an all-in-one segmentation model that leverages a bidirectional recurrent neural network to encode an input text sequence. In addition, SEGBOT incorporates another recurrent neural network and a pointer network to identify text boundaries within the input sequence. Our hierarchical model can simultaneously utilize both word-level and EDU-level information for sentence-level sentiment analysis. Through our experiments, we have demonstrated that our model surpasses previous approaches on the benchmarks of Movie Review and Stanford Sentiment Treebank.
This study examines wether the well-known peak-end-heuristic also has a bias effect on the valence ratings of visual material. The participants view different sequences of images in which the peak-image and the final-image are manipulated in terms of valence. It is expected that the peak and the end of a sequence determine the overall evaluation of the sequence’s valence.
We spend about 90% of our time in indoor environments. These environments strongly influence our health, behavior, and psychological well-being, yet we know surprisingly little about how indoor characteristics shape our affective and approach-avoidance responses. This gap exists partly because previous studies relied on small, self-curated image sets created based on differing criteria, limiting generalizability and reproducibility. To address this, we introduce the Image Database for Everyday Affective Spaces (IDEAS), an open-access dataset of 1,800 high-quality, real-world photographs from the six most frequented indoor environments: offices, living rooms, dining rooms, kitchens, bedrooms, and restaurants. These images were rated by 900 participants on valence, tense arousal, energetic arousal, and approach-avoidance in two online studies. We examined the relationship between valence, tense arousal, and energetic arousal in our dataset using seven theoretical models. Our analyses revealed a strong negative correlation between valence and tense arousal ratings of indoor scenes, whereas valence and energetic arousal, as well as energetic arousal and tense arousal, were largely independent, providing support for the three-dimensional core affect model. Demographic variables had minimal influence on affective ratings, while participants showed high inter-rater reliability. IDEAS offers a valuable resource for advancing environmental preference and broader environmental psychology research, enabling more nuanced investigation of how specific indoor environments and their characteristics shape emotional experience. Beyond normative affective scores, the dataset includes a comprehensive set of low-, mid-, and high-level visual features, individual ratings, demographic data, and copyright information. The IDEAS dataset is available on the OSF (https://osf.io/g9ze5) and GitHub (https://github.com/FatihcDeniz/Image-Database-for-Everyday-Affective-Spaces).
This study has made new contributions to Pauline epistolography by applying the results of sociolinguistic and semantic analyses of the remembrance motif and litotic disclosure formula in epistolary papyri to Paul’s forms of the formulae using an interpretive lens of lexical norms and exploitations. The analyses presented in the study reveal hitherto unnoticed elements in Paul’s communicative strategy and demonstrate how a sociolinguistic approach to documentary papyri opens up new avenues for NT research. Chapter 12 summarises this tripartite study, discusses its significance for Pauline epistolography, and suggests potential avenues of further research.
The project investigated the relationship between the semantics of attitude verbs –e.g., believe and want– and the syntactic types of embedded clauses –e.g., declarative, interrogative– they can combine with. The hypothesis pursued in the project is that such combinatorial restrictions are not the result of accidental syntactic specifications but, instead, emerge from the semantic properties of the attitude predicate. Our results substantially advance the state-of-the-art on the topic on three fronts. Empirically, we collected data across 18 languages testing semantic and combinatorial properties, resulting in a publicly available cross-linguistic database on which to test hypothesized correlations. Second, we contributed novel theoretical approaches deriving several cross-linguistically attested correlations between the semantics of attitude verbs and the clause types and subtypes they embed as well as concrete case studies. Third and finally, we addressed existing methodological limitations by defining a more articulated and fieldwork-oriented version of the Focus-sensitivity test and by experimentally testing debated empirical patterns in the literature.
The thesis investigates phraseological transformation, contamination and occasional paradigm expansion as sources of semantic ambivalence. The analysis is based on English, Russian and Uzbek examples in which a stable expression is reinterpreted through context. The study shows that phraseological ambivalence appears when an idiom is understood both as a fixed expression and as a free combination of words. Contamination creates a hybrid form in which two phraseological prototypes are simultaneously recognizable. Occasional paradigm expansion occurs when a text temporarily includes a foreign unit into an existing semantic series on the basis of phonetic, graphic or morphological similarity. These mechanisms reveal the semantic productivity of the tension between linguistic norm and contextual innovation.
This is the Adult–Child Touching Hands Dataset (AC-THD): a dataset of 59 image stimuli depicting hand-to-hand touch between an adult and a child, systematically categorized into three emotional valence classes: negative (n = 15), neutral (n = 29), and positive (n = 15). The tool emphasizes the central role of the hands in conveying emotional information within an adult–childinterpersonal context.The images and the hand-to-hand positions were developed by four trained psychologists, and were first assigned into three emotional valence categories: negative (e.g., one person tightly pinching or forcefully gripping the other person’s hand); neutral (e.g., the two individuals’ fingers lightly overlapping or their wrists touching), and positive (e.g., one person gently stroking the back of the other person’s hand or the two individuals interlocking their hands). Images were initially assigned provisional alphabetical labels, which were subsequently refined through a percentile-based procedure in accordance with validation data. The AC-THD acquisition phase involved a mother (Caucasian, aged 48, right-handed) and her child (Caucasian male, aged 10, right-handed). Images were acquired by a professional photographer using a Canon EOS 1100D digital SLR camera with a 12.2 megapixel APS-C CMOS sensor and a resolution of 4272 × 2848 pixels, equipped with an EF-S 18–55 mm f/3.5–5.6 lens. The built-in flash (Guide Number 9.2 at ISO 100) was manually triggered for each shot to standardize illumination and minimize shadows. The camera was positioned on a tripod to maintain a fixed 90° angle. All images were captured in color in sRGB mode, with framing restricted to the hands and forearms. In the validation study, images were rated by 321 participants on valence, using a numeric rating scale ranging from 0 to 10, where 0 indicates a strongly negative image, 5 a neutral image, and 10 a strongly positive image, with anchors at 0 (“strongly negative”) and 10 (“strongly positive”). Mean emotional valence ratings were calculated for each image, along with standard deviations (SDs), mode, minimum and maximum values, and percentiles. Stimuli were finally classified as negative, neutral, or positive based on the 25th and 75th percentiles of the distribution of mean valence ratings. Accordingly, images with mean valence scores ≤ 4.25 were classified as negative, those with mean valence scores > 4.25 and < 7.23 as neutral, and those with mean valence scores ≥ 7.23 as positive. Therefore, the final dataset is comprised of: N = 15 images in the negative category; N = 29 images in the neutral category; N = 15 images in the positive category. Study validation of the dataset also examined potential differences in emotional valence ratings as a function of participants’ socioeconomic status (SES) and gender, which are reported as Supplementary Materials. These images can be used across a range of research fields, including emotion elicitation, neuroscience, and psychophysiological studies, as well as for assessing affective responses in individuals with histories of supportive or adverse tactile caregiving, given their potential to evoke autobiographical memories.
This study aims to systematically identify research trends and the overall landscape of Vietnamese lexical studies conducted in Korea over the past 25 years. To this end, 56 KCI-indexed journal articles on Vietnamese vocabulary published between 2000 and 2025 were selected and analyzed in terms of annual publication trends and thematic distribution. In addition, keyword frequency analysis and LDA-based topic modeling were employed to quantitatively uncover latent thematic structures within the dataset. The results indicate that Vietnamese lexical studies in Korea have primarily focused on Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary and polysemy from semantic perspectives, while recent studies have increasingly adopted pragmatic approaches, cognitive linguistic perspectives, and data-driven methodologies. Topic modeling identified four major research clusters: (1) pragmatic semantic analysis and pedagogical applications centered on address and reference terms; (2) the establishment of lexical categories and the construction of lexical databases as research infrastructure; (3) contrastive semantic studies on meaning differentiation and lexical correspondences of homographic Sino-character words within the Sinosphere; and (4) studies on figurative meaning extension focusing on proverbs, idioms, body-part terms, and basic verbs. By quantitatively structuring accumulated research outputs and presenting a comprehensive overview of the field, this study offers an integrated understanding of Vietnamese lexical studies in Korea and suggests future research directions, including the expansion of lexical pedagogy research and further investigation into the internal lexical system of Vietnamese.