2T: Two-Term Indexing of Documents Using Syntactic and Semantic Constraints

Previous findings from event-related brain potentials (ERPs) indicate that adults who stutter (AWS) exhibit processing differences for visually presented linguistic information. This study explores how neural activations for AWS may differ for a linguistic task that does not require preparation for overt articulation or engage the articulatory loop for silent speech. Syntactic and semantic processing constraints were examined in AWS and adults who are normally fluent (AWNF) by assessment of their behavioral performance and ERPs in a natural speech listening task. AWS performed similarly to AWNF in identifying verb-agreement violations and semantic anomalies, but ERPs elicited by syntactic and semantic constraints indicated atypical neural functions for AWS. ERPs of the AWNF displayed an expected N400 for reduced semantic expectations and a typical P600 for verb-agreement violations. In contrast, both N400s and P600s for the semantic and verb-agreement conditions were observed in the ERPs of the AWS. The findings suggest that AWS may engage semantic-syntactic mechanisms more generally for semantic and syntactic processing. These findings converge with earlier studies using visual stimuli to indicate that whereas linguistic abilities are normal in AWS, underlying brain activity mediating some aspects of language processing may function differently.

Korean language has different structural properties which are controlled by semantic constraints of verbs. Also, most of Korean sentences are complex sentences which consisted of main clause and embedded clause. Therefore it is difficult to describe appropriate syntactic grammar or constraint for the Korean language and the Korean parsing causes various syntactic ambiguities. In this paper, we suggest how to describe CFG-based grammar using sentence patterns as syntactic constraint and solve syntactic ambiguities. To solve this, we classified 44 sentence patterns including complex sentences which have subordinate clause in Korean sentences and used it to reduce syntactic ambiguity. However, it is difficult to solve every syntactic ambiguity using the information of sentence patterns. So, we used semantic markers with semantic constraint. Semantic markers can be used to solve ambiguity by auxiliary particle or comitative case particle.

We present a system for extraction of temporal expressions from French texts. The identification of the temporal expressions is based on a context-scanning strategy (CSS) which is carried out by two complementary techniques: search for regular expressions and left-to-right and right-to-left local chart-parsing. A number of semantic and distant-dependency constraints have been integrated to the chart-parsing procedure in order to improve the precision of the system.

Two visual-world eyetracking experiments were conducted to investigate whether, how, and when syntactic and semantic constraints are integrated and used to predict properties of subsequent input. Experiment 1 contrasted auditory German constructions such as, "The hare-nominative eats ... (the cabbage-acc)" versus "The hare-accusative eats ... (the fox-nom)," presented with a picture containing a hare, fox, cabbage, and distractor. We found that the probabilities of the eye movements to the cabbage and fox before the onset of NP2 were modulated by the case-marking of NP1, indicating that the case-marking (syntactic) information and verbs' semantic constraints are integrated rapidly enough to predict the most plausible NP2 in the scene. Using English versions of the some stimuli in active/passive voice (Experiment 2), we replicated the same effect, but at a slightly earlier position in the sentence. We discuss the discrepancies in the two Germanic languages in terms of the ease of integrating information across, or within, constituents.

The purpose of the present study is twofold: (1) To examine whether the syntactic category constraint can determine the semantic resolution of Chinese syntactic category ambiguous words; and (2) to investigate whether the syntactic category of alternative meanings of Chinese homographs can influence the subordinate bias effect (SBE) during lexical ambiguity resolution. In the present study, four types of Chinese biased homographs (NN, VV, VN, and NV) were embedded into syntactically and semantically subordinate-biased sentences. Each homograph was assigned a frequency-matched unambiguous word as control, which could fit into the same sentence frame. Participants' eye movements were recorded as they read each sentence. In general, the results showed that in a subordinate-biased context, (1) the SBE for the four types of homograph was significant only in the second-pass reading on the post-target words and (2) numerically, the NV homographs revealed a larger effect size of SBE than VN homographs on both target and post-target words. Our findings support the constraint-satisfaction models, suggesting that the syntactic category constraint is not the only factor influencing the semantic resolution of syntactic category ambiguous words, which is opposed to the prediction of the syntax-first models.

Findings on perception of missing subjects in complement clauses are reported in two experiments with school-aged children and adults. The complement clauses were embedded into four matrix verbs in Greek, such as Ask (ask information), Promise, Tell (order/command), and Tell (give information) equivalent to English in syntactic and semantic constraints. The data from Experiment 1 show the following: (1) Perception of missing subjects in Ask, Promise, and Tell complement clauses is significantly higher than in Tell, but Guttman coefficient of scalability (.58) was slightly lower than the required one (over .60) to document a developmental sequence between the four constructions. (2) In general, these results, as other findings, contradict with Minimal Distance Principle (MDP) advocated by Chomsky (1969, 1972). (3) Differences in perceiving the source (i.e., NP) in Ask and Promise and the goal/recipient (i.e., NP) as subject in the complement clauses on Tell and Tell cannot consistently be explained by the Semantic Role Principle (SRP) postulated by Maratsos (Lederberg & Maratsos, 1981; Maratsos, 1974) either. (4) Results from Experiment 2 with three age groups, despite minor differences, confirm the results in Experiment 1, suggesting that comprehension of complement clauses with Ask, Promise, and Tell is a prerequisite to comprehension of complement clauses with Tell, according to Guttman coefficients of scalability (over .60 for all groups). (5) The findings are discussed within the framework of the SRP, but the emphasis is placed on the interaction of semantic and pragmatic presuppositions over processing the four construction types.

Knowledge extraction provides the potential for producing high quality representation of the document and can help storing, retrieving, sharing, and management of explicit biomedical knowledge. This article addresses the task of mining binary relationships between concepts from biomedical literature for scientific discovery from medical literature. The UMLS has defined the domain entities and the internal relation network between them. The expert is then guided in construct the relation template by define the syntactic and semantic constraints with the help of the pre-established domain ontology. We present the technologies in finding the possible knowledge from plain text based on some grammar analysis. Medical concepts with the similar role are grouped as a union to improve the recall and decrease the useless calculate. The medical relations are extracted according the syntactic and semantic mapping. Experiment show that the biomedical extraction system get better performance.

Extraction of information from a research article, association with other sources and inference of new knowledge is a challenging task that has not yet been entirely addressed. We present Research Spotlight, a system that leverages existing information from DBpedia, retrieves articles from repositories, extracts and interrelates various kinds of named and non-named entities by exploiting article metadata, the structure of text as well as syntactic, lexical and semantic constraints, and populates a knowledge base in the form of RDF triples. An ontology designed to represent scholarly practices is driving the whole process. The system is evaluated through two experiments that measure the overall accuracy in terms of token- and entity- based precision, recall and F1 scores, as well as entity boundary detection, with promising results.

Historically, the development of programming languages was driven by a desire to remove needless machine-oriented representation clutter from the programmer's purview. When compared with other implemented programming languages, APL goes quite far in this direction. However, like its competitors, APL provides almost no support for programs that have to access and possibly update data from shared data bases. Such data is usually subject to syntactic and semantic constraints that are declared on a community basis. Moreover, both the data and the constraints are subject to dynamic sharing with other independently-developed programs. We outline the principles underlying the relational model for formatted data bases, including the structures, algebraic operators, normalization, and formal data sublanguages. We conclude with a discussion of the need for a knowledge base (1) to act as a defining base for a proposed data base; (2) to mediate queries and transactions; and (3) to aid in query formulation in formal or natural language. A short list of references is given for those wishing more introductory information about relational database management.

Immediate recall of “sentences” by subjects with unilateral cerebral lesions

This paper contributes to the ongoing discussion on the syntax and semantics of object clauses. Using data from Hungarian and English, we claim that ‘factivity’ is a lexico-semantic concept without a direct correlate in syntax. Instead, we propose that ‘referentiality’ is the feature that differentiates a simple [CP] (the syntactic realization of a proposition) from a more complex [cP[CP]] (encoding a speech act). We support this analysis by looking at the interpretation of sentential embedding constructions and the distribution of clausal expletives in Hungarian. Our account allows us to appeal to the referential property of CP to explain wh-extraction patterns (i.e. the ‘factive island’ effect), as well as syntactic and semantic constraints on wh-expletive constructions.

As an application of their channel theory, Barwise & Seligman sketched a set-theoretic model of representation systems. Their model has the attraction of capturing many important logical properties of diagrams, but few attempts have been made to apply it to actual diagrammatic systems. We attribute this to a lack of precision in their explanation of what their model is about—what a “representation system” is. In this paper, we propose a concept of representation system on the basis of Barwise & Seligman’s original ideas, supplemented by Millikan’s theory of reproduction. On this conception, a representation system is a family of individual representational acts formed through a repetitive reproduction process that preserves a set of syntactic and semantic constraints. We will show that this concept lets us identify a piece of reality that the Barwise-Seligman model is concerned with, making the model ready for use in the logical analysis of real-world representation systems.Keywordsrepresentation systemsdiagramschannel theory

This article investigates coordination of verbal adjuncts and complements in English, considering coordinations of adjunct with adjunct, complement with complement, and adjunct with complement, for both non-WH and WH elements, using the conjunctions or, and, and but. Previous analyses have never to my knowledge covered all of these cases. It is shown that syntactic or (compositional) semantic constraints on coordination fail to cover all the facts, as do ambiguity-based explanations. Better (though still incomplete) coverage is provided by an analysis based on event semantics and neo-Gricean conversational implicature.

Lexical, syntactic and semantic constraints on auxiliary selection for in French: A first dissociation

Written words presented within a sequence of words are identified more accurately when this sequence forms a correct sentence or phrase compared with an ungrammatical re-ordering of the same words. Here we examined if this sentence superiority effect (SSE) is modulated by the predictability of the target word given the sentence context. Target words were at positions 2 and 5 in five-word sequences, and either had high or low cloze probabilities (measured by an independent cloze test and further checked using the word-in-context probabilities obtained with a Large Language Model (LLM)). Given that predictability only made sense when considering grammatically correct sequences, we performed two separate analyses. We found: (1) an effect of grammaticality (i.e., we replicated the SSE), (2) a small effect of predictability on responses to grammatically correct sequences, and (3) no interaction between predictability and grammaticality. The impact of predictability on the SSE was then evaluated by comparing the magnitude of the SSE obtained with more predictable words versus less predictable words, with the SSE in each of these conditions being measured using identification accuracy for the same word at the same position in grammatical and ungrammatical sequences. Results revealed no significant modulation of the SSE by word predictability. We conclude that syntactic and semantic constraints, and not predictability per se (as measured by a cloze test or LLM statistics), contribute to the sentence superiority effect. Crucially, this provides evidence against guessing accounts of the SSE according to which predictability should play a key role.