The Barwise-Seligman Model of Representation Systems: A Philosophical Explication

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.

Tableau-Based Revision for Expressive Description Logics with Individuals

Component-based software architecture enables software architects to design complex systems by composing components that interact through well-defined, syntactically specified interfaces. A special kind of component we investigated in our previous work is the analysis components. Analysis components support the evaluation and prediction of system’s functional and non-functional properties. Evaluating these properties early in the development process helps optimize system performance and ensure compliance with requirements. While approaches for modeling and analyzing such systems, such as the Palladio approach, support syntactic validation of the composition, they often lack mechanisms to ensure the semantic soundness of compositions. In this paper, we present a model transformation approach to help architects ensure that system models are semantically sound and behave as expected. This approach enables the transformation of Palladio models into MontiArc models, allowing architects to enrich their system representations with semantic constraints and validate these constraints with the MontiArc workbench. This ensures that component interactions are consistent with both structural composition and intended semantics. We evaluate our approach through two different case studies. From these case studies, we derived several scenarios with varying constraints and states to assess the accuracy and performance of our approach. To evaluate accuracy, we examined our approach’s ability to check semantic constraints and detect violations. We observed high accuracy across the case studies. For performance, we analyze time complexity in different constraint types. The approach performed well when applied to arithmetic constraints, with its effectiveness decreasing when applied to more complex string-centered constraints. • Propose an approach to enrich Palladio models by specifying semantic constraints. • Develop a transformation process to convert Palladio models into MontiArc models for further analysis. • Introduce an approach to verify semantic constraints within MontiArc models. • Conduct case studies and systematically derive relevant scenarios to validate the proposed approach. • Evaluate the approach in terms of accuracy and performance.

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.

Purpose of an index is to provide an intuitive navigational structure for the user into the subject matter. This paper specifies a novel, untrained method (2T) for automatically producing a two-level, semi-formal, concept-based index out of textual documents, which consists of topics rather than keywords. Using syntactic and semantic constraints and a domain ontology containing the relevant terms, we obtain high accuracy (high 80's to low 90's). Using concept categories (or semantic roles) to validate sensicality of an index term is a novel approach in semantic indexing. Resulting low-cost navigational structure can add value to businesses relying on accurate automatic document indexing (e.g. mobile news providers) or dealing with a critical learn-to-do requirement for their employees or clients (e.g. airplane maintenance). It can be implemented as a post-processing stage of full-text indexes or as readable and editable index to documentation - either printed or online.

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.

A new convergence analysis for the Volterra series representation of nonlinear systems

Recent research in language and cognitive science proposes that the linguistic system evolved to provide an “executive” control system on the evolutionarily more ancient conceptual system (e.g., Barsalou et al., 2008; Evans, 2009, 2015a,b; Bergen, 2012). In short, the claim is that embodied representations in the linguistic system interface with non-linguistic representations in the conceptual system, facilitating rich meanings, or simulations, enabling linguistically mediated communication. In this paper I build on these proposals by examining the nature of what I identify as design features for this control system. In particular, I address how the ideational function of language—our ability to deploy linguistic symbols to convey meanings of great complexity—is facilitated. The central proposal of this paper is as follows. The linguistic system of any given language user, of any given linguistic system—spoken or signed—facilitates access to knowledge representation—concepts—in the conceptual system, which subserves this ideational function. In the most general terms, the human meaning-making capacity is underpinned by two distinct, although tightly coupled representational systems: the conceptual system and the linguistic system. Each system contributes to meaning construction in qualitatively distinct ways. This leads to the first design feature: given that the two systems are representational—they are populated by semantic representations—the nature and function of the representations are qualitatively different. This proposed design feature I term the bifurcation in semantic representation. After all, it stands to reason that if a linguistic system has a different function, vis-à-vis the conceptual system, which is of far greater evolutionary antiquity, then the semantic representations will be complementary, and as such, qualitatively different, reflecting the functional distinctions of the two systems, in collectively giving rise to meaning. I consider the nature of these qualitatively distinct representations. And second, language itself is adapted to the conceptual system—the semantic potential—that it marshals in the meaning construction process. Hence, a linguistic system itself exhibits a bifurcation, in terms of the symbolic resources at its disposal. This design feature I dub the birfucation in linguistic organization. As I shall argue, this relates to two distinct reference strategies available for symbolic encoding in language: what I dub words-to-world reference and words-to-words reference. In slightly different terms, this design feature of language amounts to a distinction between a lexical subsystem, and a grammatical subsystem.

Our basic goal is the development of more robust systems for extracting information from natural language text. A robust system is one which is able to extract at least partial information despite the presence of ill-formed or unexpected syntactic, semantic, or discourse structures. Our approach has two aspects: First, we incorporate a rich set of syntactic, semantic, and discourse constraints, so that one type of constraint can guide us to a correct analysis even if another type is violated. Second, we provide mechanisms for relaxing individual constraints, and for scoring alternative analyses, so that the analysis violating the fewest constraints (and therefore, presumably, the best analysis obtainable for a sentence) will be selected.

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.

The facilitation of interoperability requires a clear distinction if a relation refers to classes of individuals or to specific instances, in particular when it comes to the logical properties of the involved relations. Class relations are defined whenever the semantics of entire classes are described, independently of single instances. Typical examples are spatial semantic integrity constraints or ontologies of entity classes. The paper continues research on spatial class relations by deepening the analysis of the reasoning properties of class relations. The work is based on a set of 17 abstract class relations defined in [11]. The paper provides a complete composition table for the 17 abstract class relations and redefines the concept of conceptual neighbourhood for class relations. This approach can be used to find conflicts and redundancies in sets of semantic integrity constraints or other applications of spatial class relations.

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.

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.