GAIML: A New Language for Verbal and Graphical Interaction in Chatbots

OpenAIRE

Roberto Pirrone; Giuseppe Russo; Vincenzo Cannella; Daniele Peri

2008-01-01

Natural and intuitive interaction between users and complex systems is a crucial research topic in human-computer interaction. A major direction is the definition and implementation of systems with natural language understanding capabilities. The interaction in natural language is often performed by means of systems called chatbots. A chatbot is a conversational agent with a proper knowledge base able to interact with users. Chatbots appearance can be very sophisticated with 3D avatars and sp...

Natural language generation of surgical procedures.

Science.gov (United States)

Wagner, J C; Rogers, J E; Baud, R H; Scherrer, J R

1999-01-01

A number of compositional Medical Concept Representation systems are being developed. Although these provide for a detailed conceptual representation of the underlying information, they have to be translated back to natural language for used by end-users and applications. The GALEN programme has been developing one such representation and we report here on a tool developed to generate natural language phrases from the GALEN conceptual representations. This tool can be adapted to different source modelling schemes and to different destination languages or sublanguages of a domain. It is based on a multilingual approach to natural language generation, realised through a clean separation of the domain model from the linguistic model and their link by well defined structures. Specific knowledge structures and operations have been developed for bridging between the modelling 'style' of the conceptual representation and natural language. Using the example of the scheme developed for modelling surgical operative procedures within the GALEN-IN-USE project, we show how the generator is adapted to such a scheme. The basic characteristics of the surgical procedures scheme are presented together with the basic principles of the generation tool. Using worked examples, we discuss the transformation operations which change the initial source representation into a form which can more directly be translated to a given natural language. In particular, the linguistic knowledge which has to be introduced--such as definitions of concepts and relationships is described. We explain the overall generator strategy and how particular transformation operations are triggered by language-dependent and conceptual parameters. Results are shown for generated French phrases corresponding to surgical procedures from the urology domain.

Generating natural language under pragmatic constraints

CERN Document Server

Hovy, Eduard H

2013-01-01

Recognizing that the generation of natural language is a goal- driven process, where many of the goals are pragmatic (i.e., interpersonal and situational) in nature, this book provides an overview of the role of pragmatics in language generation. Each chapter states a problem that arises in generation, develops a pragmatics-based solution, and then describes how the solution is implemented in PAULINE, a language generator that can produce numerous versions of a single underlying message, depending on its setting.

Public understandings of nature: a case study of local knowledge about "natural" forest conditions

Science.gov (United States)

R. Bruce Hull; David P. Robertson; Angelina Kendra

2001-01-01

This study is intended to serve as an explicit and specific example of the social construction of nature. It is motivated by the need to develop a more sophisticated language for a critical public dialogue about society's relationship with nature. We conducted a case study of environmental discourse in one local population in hopes of better understanding how a...

Teaching natural language to computers

OpenAIRE

Corneli, Joseph; Corneli, Miriam

2016-01-01

"Natural Language," whether spoken and attended to by humans, or processed and generated by computers, requires networked structures that reflect creative processes in semantic, syntactic, phonetic, linguistic, social, emotional, and cultural modules. Being able to produce novel and useful behavior following repeated practice gets to the root of both artificial intelligence and human language. This paper investigates the modalities involved in language-like applications that computers -- and ...

Thought beyond language: neural dissociation of algebra and natural language.

Science.gov (United States)

Monti, Martin M; Parsons, Lawrence M; Osherson, Daniel N

2012-08-01

A central question in cognitive science is whether natural language provides combinatorial operations that are essential to diverse domains of thought. In the study reported here, we addressed this issue by examining the role of linguistic mechanisms in forging the hierarchical structures of algebra. In a 3-T functional MRI experiment, we showed that processing of the syntax-like operations of algebra does not rely on the neural mechanisms of natural language. Our findings indicate that processing the syntax of language elicits the known substrate of linguistic competence, whereas algebraic operations recruit bilateral parietal brain regions previously implicated in the representation of magnitude. This double dissociation argues against the view that language provides the structure of thought across all cognitive domains.

Handbook of Natural Language Processing

CERN Document Server

Indurkhya, Nitin

2010-01-01

Provides a comprehensive, modern reference of practical tools and techniques for implementing natural language processing in computer systems. This title covers classical methods, empirical and statistical techniques, and various applications. It describes how the techniques can be applied to European and Asian languages as well as English

A Large-Scale Analysis of Variance in Written Language.

Science.gov (United States)

Johns, Brendan T; Jamieson, Randall K

2018-01-22

The collection of very large text sources has revolutionized the study of natural language, leading to the development of several models of language learning and distributional semantics that extract sophisticated semantic representations of words based on the statistical redundancies contained within natural language (e.g., Griffiths, Steyvers, & Tenenbaum, ; Jones & Mewhort, ; Landauer & Dumais, ; Mikolov, Sutskever, Chen, Corrado, & Dean, ). The models treat knowledge as an interaction of processing mechanisms and the structure of language experience. But language experience is often treated agnostically. We report a distributional semantic analysis that shows written language in fiction books varies appreciably between books from the different genres, books from the same genre, and even books written by the same author. Given that current theories assume that word knowledge reflects an interaction between processing mechanisms and the language environment, the analysis shows the need for the field to engage in a more deliberate consideration and curation of the corpora used in computational studies of natural language processing. Copyright © 2018 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.

An Overview of Computer-Based Natural Language Processing.

Science.gov (United States)

Gevarter, William B.

Computer-based Natural Language Processing (NLP) is the key to enabling humans and their computer-based creations to interact with machines using natural languages (English, Japanese, German, etc.) rather than formal computer languages. NLP is a major research area in the fields of artificial intelligence and computational linguistics. Commercial…

A Tableau Prover for Natural Logic and Language

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Abzianidze, Lasha

2015-01-01

Modeling the entailment relation over sentences is one of the generic problems of natural language understanding. In order to account for this problem, we design a theorem prover for Natural Logic, a logic whose terms resemble natural language expressions. The prover is based on an analytic tableau

Advances in natural language processing.

Science.gov (United States)

Hirschberg, Julia; Manning, Christopher D

2015-07-17

Natural language processing employs computational techniques for the purpose of learning, understanding, and producing human language content. Early computational approaches to language research focused on automating the analysis of the linguistic structure of language and developing basic technologies such as machine translation, speech recognition, and speech synthesis. Today's researchers refine and make use of such tools in real-world applications, creating spoken dialogue systems and speech-to-speech translation engines, mining social media for information about health or finance, and identifying sentiment and emotion toward products and services. We describe successes and challenges in this rapidly advancing area. Copyright © 2015, American Association for the Advancement of Science.

The Integration Hypothesis of Human Language Evolution and the Nature of Contemporary Languages

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Shigeru eMiyagawa

2014-06-01

Full Text Available How human language arose is a mystery in the evolution of Homo sapiens. Miyagawa, Berwick, & Okanoya (Frontiers 2013 put forward a proposal, which we will call the Integration Hypothesis of human language evolution, which holds that human language is composed of two components, E for expressive, and L for lexical. Each component has an antecedent in nature: E as found, for example, in birdsong, and L in, for example, the alarm calls of monkeys. E and L integrated uniquely in humans to give rise to language. A challenge to the Integration Hypothesis is that while these non-human systems are finite-state in nature, human language is known to require characterization by a non-finite state grammar. Our claim is that E and L, taken separately, are finite-state; when a grammatical process crosses the boundary between E and L, it gives rise to the non-finite state character of human language. We provide empirical evidence for the Integration Hypothesis by showing that certain processes found in contemporary languages that have been characterized as non-finite state in nature can in fact be shown to be finite-state. We also speculate on how human language actually arose in evolution through the lens of the Integration Hypothesis.

Do neural nets learn statistical laws behind natural language?

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Shuntaro Takahashi

Full Text Available The performance of deep learning in natural language processing has been spectacular, but the reasons for this success remain unclear because of the inherent complexity of deep learning. This paper provides empirical evidence of its effectiveness and of a limitation of neural networks for language engineering. Precisely, we demonstrate that a neural language model based on long short-term memory (LSTM effectively reproduces Zipf's law and Heaps' law, two representative statistical properties underlying natural language. We discuss the quality of reproducibility and the emergence of Zipf's law and Heaps' law as training progresses. We also point out that the neural language model has a limitation in reproducing long-range correlation, another statistical property of natural language. This understanding could provide a direction for improving the architectures of neural networks.

Clinical Natural Language Processing in languages other than English: opportunities and challenges.

Science.gov (United States)

Névéol, Aurélie; Dalianis, Hercules; Velupillai, Sumithra; Savova, Guergana; Zweigenbaum, Pierre

2018-03-30

Natural language processing applied to clinical text or aimed at a clinical outcome has been thriving in recent years. This paper offers the first broad overview of clinical Natural Language Processing (NLP) for languages other than English. Recent studies are summarized to offer insights and outline opportunities in this area. We envision three groups of intended readers: (1) NLP researchers leveraging experience gained in other languages, (2) NLP researchers faced with establishing clinical text processing in a language other than English, and (3) clinical informatics researchers and practitioners looking for resources in their languages in order to apply NLP techniques and tools to clinical practice and/or investigation. We review work in clinical NLP in languages other than English. We classify these studies into three groups: (i) studies describing the development of new NLP systems or components de novo, (ii) studies describing the adaptation of NLP architectures developed for English to another language, and (iii) studies focusing on a particular clinical application. We show the advantages and drawbacks of each method, and highlight the appropriate application context. Finally, we identify major challenges and opportunities that will affect the impact of NLP on clinical practice and public health studies in a context that encompasses English as well as other languages.

Concepts and implementations of natural language query systems

Science.gov (United States)

Dominick, Wayne D. (Editor); Liu, I-Hsiung

1984-01-01

The currently developed user language interfaces of information systems are generally intended for serious users. These interfaces commonly ignore potentially the largest user group, i.e., casual users. This project discusses the concepts and implementations of a natural query language system which satisfy the nature and information needs of casual users by allowing them to communicate with the system in the form of their native (natural) language. In addition, a framework for the development of such an interface is also introduced for the MADAM (Multics Approach to Data Access and Management) system at the University of Southwestern Louisiana.

Arabic Natural Language Processing System Code Library

Science.gov (United States)

2014-06-01

Adelphi, MD 20783-1197 This technical note provides a brief description of a Java library for Arabic natural language processing ( NLP ) containing code...for training and applying the Arabic NLP system described in the paper "A Cross-Task Flexible Transition Model for Arabic Tokenization, Affix...and also English) natural language processing ( NLP ), containing code for training and applying the Arabic NLP system described in Stephen Tratz’s

An overview of computer-based natural language processing

Science.gov (United States)

Gevarter, W. B.

1983-01-01

Computer based Natural Language Processing (NLP) is the key to enabling humans and their computer based creations to interact with machines in natural language (like English, Japanese, German, etc., in contrast to formal computer languages). The doors that such an achievement can open have made this a major research area in Artificial Intelligence and Computational Linguistics. Commercial natural language interfaces to computers have recently entered the market and future looks bright for other applications as well. This report reviews the basic approaches to such systems, the techniques utilized, applications, the state of the art of the technology, issues and research requirements, the major participants and finally, future trends and expectations. It is anticipated that this report will prove useful to engineering and research managers, potential users, and others who will be affected by this field as it unfolds.

Finite-State Methodology in Natural Language Processing

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Michal Korzycki

2001-01-01

Full Text Available Recent mathematical and algorithmic results in the field of finite-state technology, as well the increase in computing power, have constructed the base for a new approach in natural language processing. However the task of creating an appropriate model that would describe the phenomena of the natural language is still to be achieved. ln this paper I'm presenting some notions related to the finite-state modelling of syntax and morphology.

Statistical Language Models and Information Retrieval: Natural Language Processing Really Meets Retrieval

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Hiemstra, Djoerd; de Jong, Franciska M.G.

2001-01-01

Traditionally, natural language processing techniques for information retrieval have always been studied outside the framework of formal models of information retrieval. In this article, we introduce a new formal model of information retrieval based on the application of statistical language models.

Generating and Executing Complex Natural Language Queries across Linked Data.

Science.gov (United States)

Hamon, Thierry; Mougin, Fleur; Grabar, Natalia

2015-01-01

With the recent and intensive research in the biomedical area, the knowledge accumulated is disseminated through various knowledge bases. Links between these knowledge bases are needed in order to use them jointly. Linked Data, SPARQL language, and interfaces in Natural Language question-answering provide interesting solutions for querying such knowledge bases. We propose a method for translating natural language questions in SPARQL queries. We use Natural Language Processing tools, semantic resources, and the RDF triples description. The method is designed on 50 questions over 3 biomedical knowledge bases, and evaluated on 27 questions. It achieves 0.78 F-measure on the test set. The method for translating natural language questions into SPARQL queries is implemented as Perl module available at http://search.cpan.org/ thhamon/RDF-NLP-SPARQLQuery.

Natural language computing an English generative grammar in Prolog

CERN Document Server

Dougherty, Ray C

2013-01-01

This book's main goal is to show readers how to use the linguistic theory of Noam Chomsky, called Universal Grammar, to represent English, French, and German on a computer using the Prolog computer language. In so doing, it presents a follow-the-dots approach to natural language processing, linguistic theory, artificial intelligence, and expert systems. The basic idea is to introduce meaningful answers to significant problems involved in representing human language data on a computer. The book offers a hands-on approach to anyone who wishes to gain a perspective on natural language

A grammar-based semantic similarity algorithm for natural language sentences.

Science.gov (United States)

Lee, Ming Che; Chang, Jia Wei; Hsieh, Tung Cheng

2014-01-01

This paper presents a grammar and semantic corpus based similarity algorithm for natural language sentences. Natural language, in opposition to "artificial language", such as computer programming languages, is the language used by the general public for daily communication. Traditional information retrieval approaches, such as vector models, LSA, HAL, or even the ontology-based approaches that extend to include concept similarity comparison instead of cooccurrence terms/words, may not always determine the perfect matching while there is no obvious relation or concept overlap between two natural language sentences. This paper proposes a sentence similarity algorithm that takes advantage of corpus-based ontology and grammatical rules to overcome the addressed problems. Experiments on two famous benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed algorithm has a significant performance improvement in sentences/short-texts with arbitrary syntax and structure.

A System for Natural Language Sentence Generation.

Science.gov (United States)

Levison, Michael; Lessard, Gregory

1992-01-01

Describes the natural language computer program, "Vinci." Explains that using an attribute grammar formalism, Vinci can simulate components of several current linguistic theories. Considers the design of the system and its applications in linguistic modelling and second language acquisition research. Notes Vinci's uses in linguistics…

Task planning systems with natural language interface

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Kambayashi, Shaw; Uenaka, Junji

1989-12-01

In this report, a natural language analyzer and two different task planning systems are described. In 1988, we have introduced a Japanese language analyzer named CS-PARSER for the input interface of the task planning system in the Human Acts Simulation Program (HASP). For the purpose of a high speed analysis, we have modified a dictionary system of the CS-PARSER by using C language description. It is found that the new dictionary system is very useful for a high speed analysis and an efficient maintenance of the dictionary. For the study of the task planning problem, we have modified a story generating system named Micro TALE-SPIN to generate a story written in Japanese sentences. We have also constructed a planning system with natural language interface by using the CS-PARSER. Task planning processes and related knowledge bases of these systems are explained. A concept design for a new task planning system will be also discussed from evaluations of above mentioned systems. (author)

Semantic structures advances in natural language processing

CERN Document Server

Waltz, David L

2014-01-01

Natural language understanding is central to the goals of artificial intelligence. Any truly intelligent machine must be capable of carrying on a conversation: dialogue, particularly clarification dialogue, is essential if we are to avoid disasters caused by the misunderstanding of the intelligent interactive systems of the future. This book is an interim report on the grand enterprise of devising a machine that can use natural language as fluently as a human. What has really been achieved since this goal was first formulated in Turing's famous test? What obstacles still need to be overcome?

Emerging Approach of Natural Language Processing in Opinion Mining: A Review

Science.gov (United States)

Kim, Tai-Hoon

Natural language processing (NLP) is a subfield of artificial intelligence and computational linguistics. It studies the problems of automated generation and understanding of natural human languages. This paper outlines a framework to use computer and natural language techniques for various levels of learners to learn foreign languages in Computer-based Learning environment. We propose some ideas for using the computer as a practical tool for learning foreign language where the most of courseware is generated automatically. We then describe how to build Computer Based Learning tools, discuss its effectiveness, and conclude with some possibilities using on-line resources.

Pension fund sophistication and investment policy

NARCIS (Netherlands)

de Dreu, J.|info:eu-repo/dai/nl/364537906; Bikker, J.A.|info:eu-repo/dai/nl/06912261X

This paper assesses the sophistication of pension funds’ investment policies using data on 748 Dutch pension funds during the 1999–2006 period. We develop three indicators of sophistication: gross rounding of investment choices, investments in alternative sophisticated asset classes and ‘home bias’.

Developing Formal Correctness Properties from Natural Language Requirements

Science.gov (United States)

Nikora, Allen P.

2006-01-01

This viewgraph presentation reviews the rationale of the program to transform natural language specifications into formal notation.Specifically, automate generation of Linear Temporal Logic (LTL)correctness properties from natural language temporal specifications. There are several reasons for this approach (1) Model-based techniques becoming more widely accepted, (2) Analytical verification techniques (e.g., model checking, theorem proving) significantly more effective at detecting types of specification design errors (e.g., race conditions, deadlock) than manual inspection, (3) Many requirements still written in natural language, which results in a high learning curve for specification languages, associated tools and increased schedule and budget pressure on projects reduce training opportunities for engineers, and (4) Formulation of correctness properties for system models can be a difficult problem. This has relevance to NASA in that it would simplify development of formal correctness properties, lead to more widespread use of model-based specification, design techniques, assist in earlier identification of defects and reduce residual defect content for space mission software systems. The presentation also discusses: potential applications, accomplishments and/or technological transfer potential and the next steps.

A Grammar-Based Semantic Similarity Algorithm for Natural Language Sentences

Science.gov (United States)

Chang, Jia Wei; Hsieh, Tung Cheng

2014-01-01

This paper presents a grammar and semantic corpus based similarity algorithm for natural language sentences. Natural language, in opposition to “artificial language”, such as computer programming languages, is the language used by the general public for daily communication. Traditional information retrieval approaches, such as vector models, LSA, HAL, or even the ontology-based approaches that extend to include concept similarity comparison instead of cooccurrence terms/words, may not always determine the perfect matching while there is no obvious relation or concept overlap between two natural language sentences. This paper proposes a sentence similarity algorithm that takes advantage of corpus-based ontology and grammatical rules to overcome the addressed problems. Experiments on two famous benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed algorithm has a significant performance improvement in sentences/short-texts with arbitrary syntax and structure. PMID:24982952

A Grammar-Based Semantic Similarity Algorithm for Natural Language Sentences

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Ming Che Lee

2014-01-01

Full Text Available This paper presents a grammar and semantic corpus based similarity algorithm for natural language sentences. Natural language, in opposition to “artificial language”, such as computer programming languages, is the language used by the general public for daily communication. Traditional information retrieval approaches, such as vector models, LSA, HAL, or even the ontology-based approaches that extend to include concept similarity comparison instead of cooccurrence terms/words, may not always determine the perfect matching while there is no obvious relation or concept overlap between two natural language sentences. This paper proposes a sentence similarity algorithm that takes advantage of corpus-based ontology and grammatical rules to overcome the addressed problems. Experiments on two famous benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed algorithm has a significant performance improvement in sentences/short-texts with arbitrary syntax and structure.

Natural language interface for nuclear data bases

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Heger, A.S.; Koen, B.V.

1987-01-01

A natural language interface has been developed for access to information from a data base, simulating a nuclear plant reliability data system (NPRDS), one of the several existing data bases serving the nuclear industry. In the last decade, the importance of information has been demonstrated by the impressive diffusion of data base management systems. The present methods that are employed to access data bases fall into two main categories of menu-driven systems and use of data base manipulation languages. Both of these methods are currently used by NPRDS. These methods have proven to be tedious, however, and require extensive training by the user for effective utilization of the data base. Artificial intelligence techniques have been used in the development of several intelligent front ends for data bases in nonnuclear domains. Lunar is a natural language program for interface to a data base describing moon rock samples brought back by Apollo. Intellect is one of the first data base question-answering systems that was commercially available in the financial area. Ladder is an intelligent data base interface that was developed as a management aid to Navy decision makers. A natural language interface for nuclear data bases that can be used by nonprogrammers with little or no training provides a means for achieving this goal for this industry

Evolution, brain, and the nature of language.

Science.gov (United States)

Berwick, Robert C; Friederici, Angela D; Chomsky, Noam; Bolhuis, Johan J

2013-02-01

Language serves as a cornerstone for human cognition, yet much about its evolution remains puzzling. Recent research on this question parallels Darwin's attempt to explain both the unity of all species and their diversity. What has emerged from this research is that the unified nature of human language arises from a shared, species-specific computational ability. This ability has identifiable correlates in the brain and has remained fixed since the origin of language approximately 100 thousand years ago. Although songbirds share with humans a vocal imitation learning ability, with a similar underlying neural organization, language is uniquely human. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The Arabic Natural Language Processing: Introduction and Challenges

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Boukhatem Nadera

2014-09-01

Full Text Available Arabic is a Semitic language spoken by more than 330 million people as a native language, in an area extending from the Arabian/Persian Gulf in the East to the Atlantic Ocean in the West. Moreover, it is the language in which 1.4 billion Muslims around the world perform their daily prayers. Over the last few years, Arabic natural language processing (ANLP has gained increasing importance, and several state of the art systems have been developed for a wide range of applications.

ROPE: Recoverable Order-Preserving Embedding of Natural Language

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Widemann, David P. [Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States); Wang, Eric X. [Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States); Thiagarajan, Jayaraman J. [Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States)

2016-02-11

We present a novel Recoverable Order-Preserving Embedding (ROPE) of natural language. ROPE maps natural language passages from sparse concatenated one-hot representations to distributed vector representations of predetermined fixed length. We use Euclidean distance to return search results that are both grammatically and semantically similar. ROPE is based on a series of random projections of distributed word embeddings. We show that our technique typically forms a dictionary with sufficient incoherence such that sparse recovery of the original text is possible. We then show how our embedding allows for efficient and meaningful natural search and retrieval on Microsoft’s COCO dataset and the IMDB Movie Review dataset.

Symbolic Natural Language Processing

OpenAIRE

Laporte , Eric

2005-01-01

The connection between language processing and combinatorics on words is natural. Historically, linguists actually played a part in the beginning of the construction of theoretical combinatorics on words. Some of the terms in current use originate from linguistics: word, prefix, suffix, grammar, syntactic monoid... However, interpenetration between the formal world of computer theory and the intuitive world of linguistics is still a love story with ups and downs. We will encounter in this cha...

Multilingual natural language generation as part of a medical terminology server.

Science.gov (United States)

Wagner, J C; Solomon, W D; Michel, P A; Juge, C; Baud, R H; Rector, A L; Scherrer, J R

1995-01-01

Re-usable and sharable, and therefore language-independent concept models are of increasing importance in the medical domain. The GALEN project (Generalized Architecture for Languages Encyclopedias and Nomenclatures in Medicine) aims at developing language-independent concept representation systems as the foundations for the next generation of multilingual coding systems. For use within clinical applications, the content of the model has to be mapped to natural language. A so-called Multilingual Information Module (MM) establishes the link between the language-independent concept model and different natural languages. This text generation software must be versatile enough to cope at the same time with different languages and with different parts of a compositional model. It has to meet, on the one hand, the properties of the language as used in the medical domain and, on the other hand, the specific characteristics of the underlying model and its representation formalism. We propose a semantic-oriented approach to natural language generation that is based on linguistic annotations to a concept model. This approach is realized as an integral part of a Terminology Server, built around the concept model and offering different terminological services for clinical applications.

Handbook of natural language processing and machine translation DARPA global autonomous language exploitation

CERN Document Server

Olive, Joseph P; McCary, John

2011-01-01

This comprehensive handbook, written by leading experts in the field, details the groundbreaking research conducted under the breakthrough GALE program - The Global Autonomous Language Exploitation within the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), while placing it in the context of previous research in the fields of natural language and signal processing, artificial intelligence and machine translation. The most fundamental contrast between GALE and its predecessor programs was its holistic integration of previously separate or sequential processes. In earlier language research pro

Natural language processing techniques for automatic test ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

Natural language processing techniques for automatic test questions generation using discourse connectives. ... PROMOTING ACCESS TO AFRICAN RESEARCH. AFRICAN JOURNALS ... Journal of Computer Science and Its Application.

Natural language processing with Java

CERN Document Server

Reese, Richard M

2015-01-01

If you are a Java programmer who wants to learn about the fundamental tasks underlying natural language processing, this book is for you. You will be able to identify and use NLP tasks for many common problems, and integrate them in your applications to solve more difficult problems. Readers should be familiar/experienced with Java software development.

Applications of Natural Language Processing in Biodiversity Science

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Anne E. Thessen

2012-01-01

A computer can handle the volume but cannot make sense of the language. This paper reviews and discusses the use of natural language processing (NLP and machine-learning algorithms to extract information from systematic literature. NLP algorithms have been used for decades, but require special development for application in the biological realm due to the special nature of the language. Many tools exist for biological information extraction (cellular processes, taxonomic names, and morphological characters, but none have been applied life wide and most still require testing and development. Progress has been made in developing algorithms for automated annotation of taxonomic text, identification of taxonomic names in text, and extraction of morphological character information from taxonomic descriptions. This manuscript will briefly discuss the key steps in applying information extraction tools to enhance biodiversity science.

Educating the public, defending the art: language use and medical education in Hippocrates' The Art.

Science.gov (United States)

Rademaker, Adriaan

2010-01-01

The Hippocratic treatise The Art is an epideictic speech in defence of medicine against certain unnamed detractors. The author of The Art is fully aware of the fact that for him, language (as opposed to, say, a live demonstration) is the medium of education. Accordingly, the author shows full command of the main issues of the late fifth century 'sophistic' debate on the nature and the correct and effective use of language. In his views on language, the author seems to adopt a quite positivistic stance. For him, words reflect our perception and interpretation of the visual appearances or eidea of the things that are, and these appearances prove the existence of things in nature. To this extent, language reflects reality, provided that we language users have the expertise to form correct interpretations of what we observe. At the same time, language remains a secondary phenomenon: it is not a 'growth' of nature, but a set of conventional signs that have a basis in reality only if they are applied correctly. There is always the possibility of incorrect interpretation of our perceptions, which will lead to an incorrect use of language that does not reflect real phenomena. Words remain conventional expressions, and not all words can be expected to reflect the truth. In fact, the unnamed detractors of the art are victim to many such incorrect interpretations. Consistent with his view of language as secondary to visual phenomena, the author claims in his peroration that as a medium for the defence of medicine, the spoken word is generally considered less effective than live demonstrations. This modesty, while undoubtedly effective as a means to catch the sympathy of his public, still seems slightly overstated. Our author is fully aware of the powers and limitations of his medium, and shows great sophistication in its use.

Theoretical approaches to natural language understanding

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

1985-01-01

This book discusses the following: Computational Linguistics, Artificial Intelligence, Linguistics, Philosophy, and Cognitive Science and the current state of natural language understanding. Three topics form the focus for discussion; these topics include aspects of grammars, aspects of semantics/pragmatics, and knowledge representation.

Applications Associated With Morphological Analysis And Generation In Natural Language Processing

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Neha Yadav

2017-08-01

Full Text Available Natural Language Processing is one of the most developing fields in research area. In most of the applications related to the Natural Language Processing findings of the Morphological Analysis and Morphological Generation can be considered very important. As morphological study is the technique to recognise a word and its output can be used on later on stages .Keeping in view this importance this paper describes how Morphological Analysis and Morphological Generation can be proved as an important part of various Natural Language Processing fields such as Spell checker Machine Translation etc.

Statistical learning in a natural language by 8-month-old infants.

Science.gov (United States)

Pelucchi, Bruna; Hay, Jessica F; Saffran, Jenny R

2009-01-01

Numerous studies over the past decade support the claim that infants are equipped with powerful statistical language learning mechanisms. The primary evidence for statistical language learning in word segmentation comes from studies using artificial languages, continuous streams of synthesized syllables that are highly simplified relative to real speech. To what extent can these conclusions be scaled up to natural language learning? In the current experiments, English-learning 8-month-old infants' ability to track transitional probabilities in fluent infant-directed Italian speech was tested (N = 72). The results suggest that infants are sensitive to transitional probability cues in unfamiliar natural language stimuli, and support the claim that statistical learning is sufficiently robust to support aspects of real-world language acquisition.

Natural language processing tools for computer assisted language learning

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Vandeventer Faltin, Anne

2003-01-01

Full Text Available This paper illustrates the usefulness of natural language processing (NLP tools for computer assisted language learning (CALL through the presentation of three NLP tools integrated within a CALL software for French. These tools are (i a sentence structure viewer; (ii an error diagnosis system; and (iii a conjugation tool. The sentence structure viewer helps language learners grasp the structure of a sentence, by providing lexical and grammatical information. This information is derived from a deep syntactic analysis. Two different outputs are presented. The error diagnosis system is composed of a spell checker, a grammar checker, and a coherence checker. The spell checker makes use of alpha-codes, phonological reinterpretation, and some ad hoc rules to provide correction proposals. The grammar checker employs constraint relaxation and phonological reinterpretation as diagnosis techniques. The coherence checker compares the underlying "semantic" structures of a stored answer and of the learners' input to detect semantic discrepancies. The conjugation tool is a resource with enhanced capabilities when put on an electronic format, enabling searches from inflected and ambiguous verb forms.

The Islamic State Battle Plan: Press Release Natural Language Processing

Science.gov (United States)

2016-06-01

Institute for the Study of Violent Groups NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization NLP Natural Language Processing PCorpus Permanent Corpus PDF...approaches, we apply Natural Language Processing ( NLP ) tools to a unique database of text documents collected by Whiteside (2014). His collection...from Arabic to English. Compared to other terrorism databases, Whiteside’s collection methodology limits the scope of the database and avoids coding

The nature of pragmatic language impairment

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Ketelaars, M.P.

2010-01-01

The present dissertation reports on research into the nature of Pragmatic Language Impairment (PLI) in children aged 4 to 7 in the Netherlands. First, the possibility of screening for PLI in the general population is examined. Results show that this is indeed possible as well as feasible. Second, an

Neurolinguistics and psycholinguistics as a basis for computer acquisition of natural language

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Powers, D.M.W.

1983-04-01

Research into natural language understanding systems for computers has concentrated on implementing particular grammars and grammatical models of the language concerned. This paper presents a rationale for research into natural language understanding systems based on neurological and psychological principles. Important features of the approach are that it seeks to place the onus of learning the language on the computer, and that it seeks to make use of the vast wealth of relevant psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic theory. 22 references.

Natural language processing in psychiatry. Artificial intelligence technology and psychopathology.

Science.gov (United States)

Garfield, D A; Rapp, C; Evens, M

1992-04-01

The potential benefit of artificial intelligence (AI) technology as a tool of psychiatry has not been well defined. In this essay, the technology of natural language processing and its position with regard to the two main schools of AI is clearly outlined. Past experiments utilizing AI techniques in understanding psychopathology are reviewed. Natural language processing can automate the analysis of transcripts and can be used in modeling theories of language comprehension. In these ways, it can serve as a tool in testing psychological theories of psychopathology and can be used as an effective tool in empirical research on verbal behavior in psychopathology.

Template-based generation of natural language expressions with Controlled M-Grammar

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Appelo, Lisette; Leermakers, M.C.J.; Rous, J.H.G.

1993-01-01

A method is described for the generation of related natural-language expressions. The method is based on a formal grammar of the natural language in question, specified in the Controlled M-Grammar (CMG) formalism. In the CMG framework the generation of an utterance is controlled by a derivation

Deciphering the language of nature: cryptography, secrecy, and alterity in Francis Bacon.

Science.gov (United States)

Clody, Michael C

2011-01-01

The essay argues that Francis Bacon's considerations of parables and cryptography reflect larger interpretative concerns of his natural philosophic project. Bacon describes nature as having a language distinct from those of God and man, and, in so doing, establishes a central problem of his natural philosophy—namely, how can the language of nature be accessed through scientific representation? Ultimately, Bacon's solution relies on a theory of differential and duplicitous signs that conceal within them the hidden voice of nature, which is best recognized in the natural forms of efficient causality. The "alphabet of nature"—those tables of natural occurrences—consequently plays a central role in his program, as it renders nature's language susceptible to a process and decryption that mirrors the model of the bilateral cipher. It is argued that while the writing of Bacon's natural philosophy strives for literality, its investigative process preserves a space for alterity within scientific representation, that is made accessible to those with the interpretative key.

Representing Information in Patient Reports Using Natural Language Processing and the Extensible Markup Language

Science.gov (United States)

Friedman, Carol; Hripcsak, George; Shagina, Lyuda; Liu, Hongfang

1999-01-01

Objective: To design a document model that provides reliable and efficient access to clinical information in patient reports for a broad range of clinical applications, and to implement an automated method using natural language processing that maps textual reports to a form consistent with the model. Methods: A document model that encodes structured clinical information in patient reports while retaining the original contents was designed using the extensible markup language (XML), and a document type definition (DTD) was created. An existing natural language processor (NLP) was modified to generate output consistent with the model. Two hundred reports were processed using the modified NLP system, and the XML output that was generated was validated using an XML validating parser. Results: The modified NLP system successfully processed all 200 reports. The output of one report was invalid, and 199 reports were valid XML forms consistent with the DTD. Conclusions: Natural language processing can be used to automatically create an enriched document that contains a structured component whose elements are linked to portions of the original textual report. This integrated document model provides a representation where documents containing specific information can be accurately and efficiently retrieved by querying the structured components. If manual review of the documents is desired, the salient information in the original reports can also be identified and highlighted. Using an XML model of tagging provides an additional benefit in that software tools that manipulate XML documents are readily available. PMID:9925230

Dependency distance: A new perspective on syntactic patterns in natural languages

Science.gov (United States)

Liu, Haitao; Xu, Chunshan; Liang, Junying

2017-07-01

Dependency distance, measured by the linear distance between two syntactically related words in a sentence, is generally held as an important index of memory burden and an indicator of syntactic difficulty. Since this constraint of memory is common for all human beings, there may well be a universal preference for dependency distance minimization (DDM) for the sake of reducing memory burden. This human-driven language universal is supported by big data analyses of various corpora that consistently report shorter overall dependency distance in natural languages than in artificial random languages and long-tailed distributions featuring a majority of short dependencies and a minority of long ones. Human languages, as complex systems, seem to have evolved to come up with diverse syntactic patterns under the universal pressure for dependency distance minimization. However, there always exist a small number of long-distance dependencies in natural languages, which may reflect some other biological or functional constraints. Language system may adapt itself to these sporadic long-distance dependencies. It is these universal constraints that have shaped such a rich diversity of syntactic patterns in human languages.

Automatic Item Generation via Frame Semantics: Natural Language Generation of Math Word Problems.

Science.gov (United States)

Deane, Paul; Sheehan, Kathleen

This paper is an exploration of the conceptual issues that have arisen in the course of building a natural language generation (NLG) system for automatic test item generation. While natural language processing techniques are applicable to general verbal items, mathematics word problems are particularly tractable targets for natural language…

An algorithm to transform natural language into SQL queries for relational databases

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Garima Singh

2016-09-01

Full Text Available Intelligent interface, to enhance efficient interactions between user and databases, is the need of the database applications. Databases must be intelligent enough to make the accessibility faster. However, not every user familiar with the Structured Query Language (SQL queries as they may not aware of structure of the database and they thus require to learn SQL. So, non-expert users need a system to interact with relational databases in their natural language such as English. For this, Database Management System (DBMS must have an ability to understand Natural Language (NL. In this research, an intelligent interface is developed using semantic matching technique which translates natural language query to SQL using set of production rules and data dictionary. The data dictionary consists of semantics sets for relations and attributes. A series of steps like lower case conversion, tokenization, speech tagging, database element and SQL element extraction is used to convert Natural Language Query (NLQ to SQL Query. The transformed query is executed and the results are obtained by the user. Intelligent Interface is the need of database applications to enhance efficient interaction between user and DBMS.

Natural language generation in health care.

Science.gov (United States)

Cawsey, A J; Webber, B L; Jones, R B

1997-01-01

Good communication is vital in health care, both among health care professionals, and between health care professionals and their patients. And well-written documents, describing and/or explaining the information in structured databases may be easier to comprehend, more edifying, and even more convincing than the structured data, even when presented in tabular or graphic form. Documents may be automatically generated from structured data, using techniques from the field of natural language generation. These techniques are concerned with how the content, organization and language used in a document can be dynamically selected, depending on the audience and context. They have been used to generate health education materials, explanations and critiques in decision support systems, and medical reports and progress notes.

Natural Language Generation for dialogue: system survey

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Theune, Mariet

Many natural language dialogue systems make use of `canned text' for output generation. This approach may be su±cient for dialogues in restricted domains where system utterances are short and simple and use fixed expressions (e.g., slot filling dialogues in the ticket reservation or travel

Natural language processing and the Now-or-Never bottleneck.

Science.gov (United States)

Gómez-Rodríguez, Carlos

2016-01-01

Researchers, motivated by the need to improve the efficiency of natural language processing tools to handle web-scale data, have recently arrived at models that remarkably match the expected features of human language processing under the Now-or-Never bottleneck framework. This provides additional support for said framework and highlights the research potential in the interaction between applied computational linguistics and cognitive science.

Natural language understanding

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Yoshida, S

1982-04-01

Language understanding is essential for intelligent information processing. Processing of language itself involves configuration element analysis, syntactic analysis (parsing), and semantic analysis. They are not carried out in isolation. These are described for the Japanese language and their usage in understanding-systems is examined. 30 references.

The value of multivariate model sophistication

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Rombouts, Jeroen; Stentoft, Lars; Violante, Francesco

2014-01-01

We assess the predictive accuracies of a large number of multivariate volatility models in terms of pricing options on the Dow Jones Industrial Average. We measure the value of model sophistication in terms of dollar losses by considering a set of 444 multivariate models that differ in their spec....... In addition to investigating the value of model sophistication in terms of dollar losses directly, we also use the model confidence set approach to statistically infer the set of models that delivers the best pricing performances.......We assess the predictive accuracies of a large number of multivariate volatility models in terms of pricing options on the Dow Jones Industrial Average. We measure the value of model sophistication in terms of dollar losses by considering a set of 444 multivariate models that differ...

Dependency distance: A new perspective on syntactic patterns in natural languages.

Science.gov (United States)

Liu, Haitao; Xu, Chunshan; Liang, Junying

2017-07-01

Dependency distance, measured by the linear distance between two syntactically related words in a sentence, is generally held as an important index of memory burden and an indicator of syntactic difficulty. Since this constraint of memory is common for all human beings, there may well be a universal preference for dependency distance minimization (DDM) for the sake of reducing memory burden. This human-driven language universal is supported by big data analyses of various corpora that consistently report shorter overall dependency distance in natural languages than in artificial random languages and long-tailed distributions featuring a majority of short dependencies and a minority of long ones. Human languages, as complex systems, seem to have evolved to come up with diverse syntactic patterns under the universal pressure for dependency distance minimization. However, there always exist a small number of long-distance dependencies in natural languages, which may reflect some other biological or functional constraints. Language system may adapt itself to these sporadic long-distance dependencies. It is these universal constraints that have shaped such a rich diversity of syntactic patterns in human languages. Copyright © 2017. Published by Elsevier B.V.

Natural Language Navigation Support in Virtual Reality

NARCIS (Netherlands)

van Luin, J.; Nijholt, Antinus; op den Akker, Hendrikus J.A.; Giagourta, V.; Strintzis, M.G.

2001-01-01

We describe our work on designing a natural language accessible navigation agent for a virtual reality (VR) environment. The agent is part of an agent framework, which means that it can communicate with other agents. Its navigation task consists of guiding the visitors in the environment and to

Natural-language processing applied to an ITS interface

OpenAIRE

Antonio Gisolfi; Enrico Fischetti

1994-01-01

The aim of this paper is to show that with a subset of a natural language, simple systems running on PCs can be developed that can nevertheless be an effective tool for interfacing purposes in the building of an Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS). After presenting the special characteristics of the Smalltalk/V language, which provides an appropriate environment for the development of an interface, the overall architecture of the interface module is discussed. We then show how sentences are par...

Differential ethnic associations between maternal flexibility and play sophistication in toddlers born very low birth weight

Science.gov (United States)

Erickson, Sarah J.; Montague, Erica Q.; Maclean, Peggy C.; Bancroft, Mary E.; Lowe, Jean R.

2013-01-01

Children born very low birth weight (development of self-regulation and effective functional skills, and play serves as an important avenue of early intervention. The current study investigated associations between maternal flexibility and toddler play sophistication in Caucasian, Spanish speaking Hispanic, English speaking Hispanic, and Native American toddlers (18-22 months adjusted age) in a cross-sectional cohort of 73 toddlers born VLBW and their mothers. We found that the association between maternal flexibility and toddler play sophistication differed by ethnicity (F(3,65) = 3.34, p = .02). In particular, Spanish speaking Hispanic dyads evidenced a significant positive association between maternal flexibility and play sophistication of medium effect size. Results for Native Americans were parallel to those of Spanish speaking Hispanic dyads: the relationship between flexibility and play sophistication was positive and of small-medium effect size. Findings indicate that for Caucasians and English speaking Hispanics, flexibility evidenced a non-significant (negative and small effect size) association with toddler play sophistication. Significant follow-up contrasts revealed that the associations for Caucasian and English speaking Hispanic dyads were significantly different from those of the other two ethnic groups. Results remained unchanged after adjusting for the amount of maternal language, an index of maternal engagement and stimulation; and after adjusting for birth weight, gestational age, gender, test age, cognitive ability, as well maternal age, education, and income. Our results provide preliminary evidence that ethnicity and acculturation may mediate the association between maternal interactive behavior such as flexibility and toddler developmental outcomes, as indexed by play sophistication. Addressing these association differences is particularly important in children born VLBW because interventions targeting parent interaction strategies such as

Selecting the Best Mobile Information Service with Natural Language User Input

Science.gov (United States)

Feng, Qiangze; Qi, Hongwei; Fukushima, Toshikazu

Information services accessed via mobile phones provide information directly relevant to subscribers’ daily lives and are an area of dynamic market growth worldwide. Although many information services are currently offered by mobile operators, many of the existing solutions require a unique gateway for each service, and it is inconvenient for users to have to remember a large number of such gateways. Furthermore, the Short Message Service (SMS) is very popular in China and Chinese users would prefer to access these services in natural language via SMS. This chapter describes a Natural Language Based Service Selection System (NL3S) for use with a large number of mobile information services. The system can accept user queries in natural language and navigate it to the required service. Since it is difficult for existing methods to achieve high accuracy and high coverage and anticipate which other services a user might want to query, the NL3S is developed based on a Multi-service Ontology (MO) and Multi-service Query Language (MQL). The MO and MQL provide semantic and linguistic knowledge, respectively, to facilitate service selection for a user query and to provide adaptive service recommendations. Experiments show that the NL3S can achieve 75-95% accuracies and 85-95% satisfactions for processing various styles of natural language queries. A trial involving navigation of 30 different mobile services shows that the NL3S can provide a viable commercial solution for mobile operators.

Learning to rank for information retrieval and natural language processing

CERN Document Server

Li, Hang

2014-01-01

Learning to rank refers to machine learning techniques for training a model in a ranking task. Learning to rank is useful for many applications in information retrieval, natural language processing, and data mining. Intensive studies have been conducted on its problems recently, and significant progress has been made. This lecture gives an introduction to the area including the fundamental problems, major approaches, theories, applications, and future work.The author begins by showing that various ranking problems in information retrieval and natural language processing can be formalized as tw

UNLization of Punjabi text for natural language processing ...

Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

Vaibhav Agarwal

2018-05-26

May 26, 2018 ... resent, and store information in a natural-language-inde- pendent format [8]. UNL is .... account semantic information available in words of the problem ...... Sentiment Analysis (SA) plays a vital role in decision making process.

A Chatbot as a Natural Web Interface to Arabic Web QA

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Bayan Abu Shawar

2011-03-01

Full Text Available In this paper, we describe a way to access Arabic Web Question Answering (QA corpus using a chatbot, without the need for sophisticated natural language processing or logical inference. Any Natural Language (NL interface to Question Answer (QA system is constrained to reply with the given answers, so there is no need for NL generation to recreate well-formed answers, or for deep analysis or logical inference to map user input questions onto this logical ontology; simple (but large set of pattern-template matching rules will suffice. In previous research, this approach works properly with English and other European languages. In this paper, we try to see how the same chatbot will react in terms of Arabic Web QA corpus. Initial results shows that 93% of answers were correct, but because of a lot of characteristics related to Arabic language, changing Arabic questions into other forms may lead to no answers.

Three-dimensional grammar in the brain: Dissociating the neural correlates of natural sign language and manually coded spoken language.

Science.gov (United States)

Jednoróg, Katarzyna; Bola, Łukasz; Mostowski, Piotr; Szwed, Marcin; Boguszewski, Paweł M; Marchewka, Artur; Rutkowski, Paweł

2015-05-01

In several countries natural sign languages were considered inadequate for education. Instead, new sign-supported systems were created, based on the belief that spoken/written language is grammatically superior. One such system called SJM (system językowo-migowy) preserves the grammatical and lexical structure of spoken Polish and since 1960s has been extensively employed in schools and on TV. Nevertheless, the Deaf community avoids using SJM for everyday communication, its preferred language being PJM (polski język migowy), a natural sign language, structurally and grammatically independent of spoken Polish and featuring classifier constructions (CCs). Here, for the first time, we compare, with fMRI method, the neural bases of natural vs. devised communication systems. Deaf signers were presented with three types of signed sentences (SJM and PJM with/without CCs). Consistent with previous findings, PJM with CCs compared to either SJM or PJM without CCs recruited the parietal lobes. The reverse comparison revealed activation in the anterior temporal lobes, suggesting increased semantic combinatory processes in lexical sign comprehension. Finally, PJM compared with SJM engaged left posterior superior temporal gyrus and anterior temporal lobe, areas crucial for sentence-level speech comprehension. We suggest that activity in these two areas reflects greater processing efficiency for naturally evolved sign language. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

System reliability analysis with natural language and expert's subjectivity

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Onisawa, T.

1996-01-01

This paper introduces natural language expressions and expert's subjectivity to system reliability analysis. To this end, this paper defines a subjective measure of reliability and presents the method of the system reliability analysis using the measure. The subjective measure of reliability corresponds to natural language expressions of reliability estimation, which is represented by a fuzzy set defined on [0,1]. The presented method deals with the dependence among subsystems and employs parametrized operations of subjective measures of reliability which can reflect expert 's subjectivity towards the analyzed system. The analysis results are also expressed by linguistic terms. Finally this paper gives an example of the system reliability analysis by the presented method

SuML: A Survey Markup Language for Generalized Survey Encoding

Science.gov (United States)

Barclay, MW; Lober, WB; Karras, BT

2002-01-01

There is a need in clinical and research settings for a sophisticated, generalized, web based survey tool that supports complex logic, separation of content and presentation, and computable guidelines. There are many commercial and open source survey packages available that provide simple logic; few provide sophistication beyond “goto” statements; none support the use of guidelines. These tools are driven by databases, static web pages, and structured documents using markup languages such as eXtensible Markup Language (XML). We propose a generalized, guideline aware language and an implementation architecture using open source standards.

Learning to Understand Natural Language with Less Human Effort

Science.gov (United States)

2015-05-01

Supervision Distant supervision is a recent trend in information extraction. Distantly-supervised extractors are trained using a corpus of unlabeled text...consists of fill-in-the-blank natural language questions such as “Incan emperor ” or “Cunningham directed Auchtre’s second music video .” These questions...with an 132 unknown knowledge base, simultaneously learning how to semantically parse language and pop - ulate the knowledge base. The weakly

Interactive natural language acquisition in a multi-modal recurrent neural architecture

Science.gov (United States)

Heinrich, Stefan; Wermter, Stefan

2018-01-01

For the complex human brain that enables us to communicate in natural language, we gathered good understandings of principles underlying language acquisition and processing, knowledge about sociocultural conditions, and insights into activity patterns in the brain. However, we were not yet able to understand the behavioural and mechanistic characteristics for natural language and how mechanisms in the brain allow to acquire and process language. In bridging the insights from behavioural psychology and neuroscience, the goal of this paper is to contribute a computational understanding of appropriate characteristics that favour language acquisition. Accordingly, we provide concepts and refinements in cognitive modelling regarding principles and mechanisms in the brain and propose a neurocognitively plausible model for embodied language acquisition from real-world interaction of a humanoid robot with its environment. In particular, the architecture consists of a continuous time recurrent neural network, where parts have different leakage characteristics and thus operate on multiple timescales for every modality and the association of the higher level nodes of all modalities into cell assemblies. The model is capable of learning language production grounded in both, temporal dynamic somatosensation and vision, and features hierarchical concept abstraction, concept decomposition, multi-modal integration, and self-organisation of latent representations.

The musicality of non-musicians: an index for assessing musical sophistication in the general population.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Daniel Müllensiefen

Full Text Available Musical skills and expertise vary greatly in Western societies. Individuals can differ in their repertoire of musical behaviours as well as in the level of skill they display for any single musical behaviour. The types of musical behaviours we refer to here are broad, ranging from performance on an instrument and listening expertise, to the ability to employ music in functional settings or to communicate about music. In this paper, we first describe the concept of 'musical sophistication' which can be used to describe the multi-faceted nature of musical expertise. Next, we develop a novel measurement instrument, the Goldsmiths Musical Sophistication Index (Gold-MSI to assess self-reported musical skills and behaviours on multiple dimensions in the general population using a large Internet sample (n = 147,636. Thirdly, we report results from several lab studies, demonstrating that the Gold-MSI possesses good psychometric properties, and that self-reported musical sophistication is associated with performance on two listening tasks. Finally, we identify occupation, occupational status, age, gender, and wealth as the main socio-demographic factors associated with musical sophistication. Results are discussed in terms of theoretical accounts of implicit and statistical music learning and with regard to social conditions of sophisticated musical engagement.

The musicality of non-musicians: an index for assessing musical sophistication in the general population.

Science.gov (United States)

Müllensiefen, Daniel; Gingras, Bruno; Musil, Jason; Stewart, Lauren

2014-01-01

Musical skills and expertise vary greatly in Western societies. Individuals can differ in their repertoire of musical behaviours as well as in the level of skill they display for any single musical behaviour. The types of musical behaviours we refer to here are broad, ranging from performance on an instrument and listening expertise, to the ability to employ music in functional settings or to communicate about music. In this paper, we first describe the concept of 'musical sophistication' which can be used to describe the multi-faceted nature of musical expertise. Next, we develop a novel measurement instrument, the Goldsmiths Musical Sophistication Index (Gold-MSI) to assess self-reported musical skills and behaviours on multiple dimensions in the general population using a large Internet sample (n = 147,636). Thirdly, we report results from several lab studies, demonstrating that the Gold-MSI possesses good psychometric properties, and that self-reported musical sophistication is associated with performance on two listening tasks. Finally, we identify occupation, occupational status, age, gender, and wealth as the main socio-demographic factors associated with musical sophistication. Results are discussed in terms of theoretical accounts of implicit and statistical music learning and with regard to social conditions of sophisticated musical engagement.

Sophistication and Performance of Italian Agri‐food Exports

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Anna Carbone

2012-06-01

Full Text Available Nonprice competition is increasingly important in world food markets. Recently, the expression ‘export sophistication’ has been introduced in the economic literature to refer to a wide set of attributes that increase product value. An index has been proposed to measure sophistication in an indirect way through the per capita GDP of exporting countries (Lall et al., 2006; Haussmann et al., 2007.The paper applies the sophistication measure to the Italian food export sector, moving from an analysis of trends and performance of Italian food exports. An original way to disentangle different components in the temporal variation of the sophistication index is also proposed.Results show that the sophistication index offers original insights on recent trends in world food exports and with respect to Italian core food exports.

GAIML: A New Language for Verbal and Graphical Interaction in Chatbots

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Roberto Pirrone

2008-01-01

Full Text Available Natural and intuitive interaction between users and complex systems is a crucial research topic in human-computer interaction. A major direction is the definition and implementation of systems with natural language understanding capabilities. The interaction in natural language is often performed by means of systems called chatbots. A chatbot is a conversational agent with a proper knowledge base able to interact with users. Chatbots appearance can be very sophisticated with 3D avatars and speech processing modules. However the interaction between the system and the user is only performed through textual areas for inputs and replies. An interaction able to add to natural language also graphical widgets could be more effective. On the other side, a graphical interaction involving also the natural language can increase the comfort of the user instead of using only graphical widgets. In many applications multi-modal communication must be preferred when the user and the system have a tight and complex interaction. Typical examples are cultural heritages applications (intelligent museum guides, picture browsing or systems providing the user with integrated information taken from different and heterogenous sources as in the case of the iGoogle™ interface. We propose to mix the two modalities (verbal and graphical to build systems with a reconfigurable interface, which is able to change with respect to the particular application context. The result of this proposal is the Graphical Artificial Intelligence Markup Language (GAIML an extension of AIML allowing merging both interaction modalities. In this context a suitable chatbot system called Graphbot is presented to support this language. With this language is possible to define personalized interface patterns that are the most suitable ones in relation to the data types exchanged between the user and the system according to the context of the dialogue.

Integrating deep and shallow natural language processing components : representations and hybrid architectures

OpenAIRE

Schäfer, Ulrich

2006-01-01

We describe basic concepts and software architectures for the integration of shallow and deep (linguistics-based, semantics-oriented) natural language processing (NLP) components. The main goal of this novel, hybrid integration paradigm is improving robustness of deep processing. After an introduction to constraint-based natural language parsing, we give an overview of typical shallow processing tasks. We introduce XML standoff markup as an additional abstraction layer that eases integration ...

Brain readiness and the nature of language.

Science.gov (United States)

Bouchard, Denis

2015-01-01

To identify the neural components that make a brain ready for language, it is important to have well defined linguistic phenotypes, to know precisely what language is. There are two central features to language: the capacity to form signs (words), and the capacity to combine them into complex structures. We must determine how the human brain enables these capacities. A sign is a link between a perceptual form and a conceptual meaning. Acoustic elements and content elements, are already brain-internal in non-human animals, but as categorical systems linked with brain-external elements. Being indexically tied to objects of the world, they cannot freely link to form signs. A crucial property of a language-ready brain is the capacity to process perceptual forms and contents offline, detached from any brain-external phenomena, so their "representations" may be linked into signs. These brain systems appear to have pleiotropic effects on a variety of phenotypic traits and not to be specifically designed for language. Syntax combines signs, so the combination of two signs operates simultaneously on their meaning and form. The operation combining the meanings long antedates its function in language: the primitive mode of predication operative in representing some information about an object. The combination of the forms is enabled by the capacity of the brain to segment vocal and visual information into discrete elements. Discrete temporal units have order and juxtaposition, and vocal units have intonation, length, and stress. These are primitive combinatorial processes. So the prior properties of the physical and conceptual elements of the sign introduce combinatoriality into the linguistic system, and from these primitive combinatorial systems derive concatenation in phonology and combination in morphosyntax. Given the nature of language, a key feature to our understanding of the language-ready brain is to be found in the mechanisms in human brains that enable the unique

Brain readiness and the nature of language

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Denis eBouchard

2015-09-01

Full Text Available To identify the neural components that make a brain ready for language, it is important to have well defined linguistic phenotypes, to know precisely what language is. There are two central features to language: the capacity to form signs (words, and the capacity to combine them into complex structures. We must determine how the human brain enables these capacities.A sign is a link between a perceptual form and a conceptual meaning. Acoustic elements and content elements, are already brain-internal in non-human animals, but as categorical systems linked with brain-external elements. Being indexically tied to objects of the world, they cannot freely link to form signs. A crucial property of a language-ready brain is the capacity to process perceptual forms and contents offline, detached from any brain-external phenomena, so their representations may be linked into signs. These brain systems appear to have pleiotropic effects on a variety of phenotypic traits and not to be specifically designed for language.Syntax combines signs, so the combination of two signs operates simultaneously on their meaning and form. The operation combining the meanings long antedates its function in language: the primitive mode of predication operative in representing some information about an object. The combination of the forms is enabled by the capacity of the brain to segment vocal and visual information into discrete elements. Discrete temporal units have order and juxtaposition, and vocal units have intonation, length, and stress. These are primitive combinatorial processes. So the prior properties of the physical and conceptual elements of the sign introduce combinatoriality into the linguistic system, and from these primitive combinatorial systems derive concatenation in phonology and combination in morphosyntax.Given the nature of language, a key feature to our understanding of the language-ready brain is to be found in the mechanisms in human brains that

SELECTION OF ONTOLOGY FOR WEB SERVICE DESCRIPTION LANGUAGE TO ONTOLOGY WEB LANGUAGE CONVERSION

OpenAIRE

J. Mannar Mannan; M. Sundarambal; S. Raghul

2014-01-01

Semantic web is to extend the current human readable web to encoding some of the semantic of resources in a machine processing form. As a Semantic web component, Semantic Web Services (SWS) uses a mark-up that makes the data into detailed and sophisticated machine readable way. One such language is Ontology Web Language (OWL). Existing conventional web service annotation can be changed to semantic web service by mapping Web Service Description Language (WSDL) with the semantic annotation of O...

Understanding and representing natural language meaning

Science.gov (United States)

Waltz, D. L.; Maran, L. R.; Dorfman, M. H.; Dinitz, R.; Farwell, D.

1982-12-01

During this contract period the authors have: (1) continued investigation of events and actions by means of representation schemes called 'event shape diagrams'; (2) written a parsing program which selects appropriate word and sentence meanings by a parallel process know as activation and inhibition; (3) begun investigation of the point of a story or event by modeling the motivations and emotional behaviors of story characters; (4) started work on combining and translating two machine-readable dictionaries into a lexicon and knowledge base which will form an integral part of our natural language understanding programs; (5) made substantial progress toward a general model for the representation of cognitive relations by comparing English scene and event descriptions with similar descriptions in other languages; (6) constructed a general model for the representation of tense and aspect of verbs; (7) made progress toward the design of an integrated robotics system which accepts English requests, and uses visual and tactile inputs in making decisions and learning new tasks.

Ontology Based Queries - Investigating a Natural Language Interface

NARCIS (Netherlands)

van der Sluis, Ielka; Hielkema, F.; Mellish, C.; Doherty, G.

2010-01-01

In this paper we look at what may be learned from a comparative study examining non-technical users with a background in social science browsing and querying metadata. Four query tasks were carried out with a natural language interface and with an interface that uses a web paradigm with hyperlinks.

Natural language retrieval in nuclear safety information system

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Komata, Masaoki; Oosawa, Yasuo; Ujita, Hiroshi

1983-01-01

A natural language retrieval program NATLANG is developed to assist in the retrieval of information from event-and-cause descriptions in Licensee Event Reports (LER). The characteristics of NATLANG are (1) the use of base forms of words to retrieve related forms altered by the addition of prefixes or suffixes or changes in inflection, (2) direct access and short time retrieval with an alphabet pointer, (3) effective determination of the items and entries for a Hitachi event classification in a two step retrieval scheme, and (4) Japanese character output with the PL-1 language. NATLANG output reduces the effort needed to re-classify licensee events in the Hitachi event classification. (author)

Capturing and Modeling Domain Knowledge Using Natural Language Processing Techniques

National Research Council Canada - National Science Library

Auger, Alain

2005-01-01

.... Initiated in 2004 at Defense Research and Development Canada (DRDC), the SACOT knowledge engineering research project is currently investigating, developing and validating innovative natural language processing (NLP...

The First Sophists and the Uses of History.

Science.gov (United States)

Jarratt, Susan C.

1987-01-01

Reviews the history of intellectual views on the Greek sophists in three phases: (1) their disparagement by Plato and Aristotle as the morally disgraceful "other"; (2) nineteenth century British positivists' reappraisal of these relativists as ethically and scientifically superior; and (3) twentieth century versions of the sophists as…

Cumulative Dominance and Probabilistic Sophistication

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Wakker, P.P.; Sarin, R.H.

2000-01-01

Machina & Schmeidler (Econometrica, 60, 1992) gave preference conditions for probabilistic sophistication, i.e. decision making where uncertainty can be expressed in terms of (subjective) probabilities without commitment to expected utility maximization. This note shows that simpler and more general

A Classification of Sentences Used in Natural Language Processing in the Military Services.

Science.gov (United States)

Wittrock, Merlin C.

Concepts in cognitive psychology are applied to the language used in military situations, and a sentence classification system for use in analyzing military language is outlined. The system is designed to be used, in part, in conjunction with a natural language query system that allows a user to access a database. The discussion of military…

Orwell's 1984: Natural Language Searching and the Contemporary Metaphor.

Science.gov (United States)

Dadlez, Eva M.

1984-01-01

Describes a natural language searching strategy for retrieving current material which has bearing on George Orwell's "1984," and identifies four main themes (technology, authoritarianism, press and psychological/linguistic implications of surveillance, political oppression) which have emerged from cross-database searches of the "Big…

Evaluation of uncertainty in the measurement of sense of natural language constructions

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Bisikalo Oleg V.

2017-01-01

Full Text Available The task of evaluating uncertainty in the measurement of sense in natural language constructions (NLCs was researched through formalization of the notions of the language image, formalization of artificial cognitive systems (ACSs and the formalization of units of meaning. The method for measuring the sense of natural language constructions incorporated fuzzy relations of meaning, which ensures that information about the links between lemmas of the text is taken into account, permitting the evaluation of two types of measurement uncertainty of sense characteristics. Using developed applications programs, experiments were conducted to investigate the proposed method to tackle the identification of informative characteristics of text. The experiments resulted in dependencies of parameters being obtained in order to utilise the Pareto distribution law to define relations between lemmas, analysis of which permits the identification of exponents of an average number of connections of the language image as the most informative characteristics of text.

Using of Natural Language Processing Techniques in Suicide Research

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Azam Orooji

2017-09-01

Full Text Available It is estimated that each year many people, most of whom are teenagers and young adults die by suicide worldwide. Suicide receives special attention with many countries developing national strategies for prevention. Since, more medical information is available in text, Preventing the growing trend of suicide in communities requires analyzing various textual resources, such as patient records, information on the web or questionnaires. For this purpose, this study systematically reviews recent studies related to the use of natural language processing techniques in the area of people’s health who have completed suicide or are at risk. After electronically searching for the PubMed and ScienceDirect databases and studying articles by two reviewers, 21 articles matched the inclusion criteria. This study revealed that, if a suitable data set is available, natural language processing techniques are well suited for various types of suicide related research.

Discovery of Kolmogorov Scaling in the Natural Language

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Maurice H. P. M. van Putten

2017-05-01

Full Text Available We consider the rate R and variance σ 2 of Shannon information in snippets of text based on word frequencies in the natural language. We empirically identify Kolmogorov’s scaling law in σ 2 ∝ k - 1 . 66 ± 0 . 12 (95% c.l. as a function of k = 1 / N measured by word count N. This result highlights a potential association of information flow in snippets, analogous to energy cascade in turbulent eddies in fluids at high Reynolds numbers. We propose R and σ 2 as robust utility functions for objective ranking of concordances in efficient search for maximal information seamlessly across different languages and as a starting point for artificial attention.

MILROY, Lesley. Observing and Analysing Natural Language: A Critical Account of Sociolinguistic Method. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987. 230pp. MILROY, Lesley. Observing and Analysing Natural Language: A Critical Account of Sociolinguistic Method. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987. 230pp.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Iria Werlang Garcia

2008-04-01

Full Text Available Lesley Milroy's Observing and Analysing Natural Language is a recent addition to an ever growing number of publications in the field of Sociolinguistics. It carries the weight of one of the experienced authors in the current days in the specified field and should offer basic information to both newcomers and established investigators in natural language. Lesley Milroy's Observing and Analysing Natural Language is a recent addition to an ever growing number of publications in the field of Sociolinguistics. It carries the weight of one of the experienced authors in the current days in the specified field and should offer basic information to both newcomers and established investigators in natural language.

Artificial intelligence, expert systems, computer vision, and natural language processing

Science.gov (United States)

Gevarter, W. B.

1984-01-01

An overview of artificial intelligence (AI), its core ingredients, and its applications is presented. The knowledge representation, logic, problem solving approaches, languages, and computers pertaining to AI are examined, and the state of the art in AI is reviewed. The use of AI in expert systems, computer vision, natural language processing, speech recognition and understanding, speech synthesis, problem solving, and planning is examined. Basic AI topics, including automation, search-oriented problem solving, knowledge representation, and computational logic, are discussed.

CITE NLM: Natural-Language Searching in an Online Catalog.

Science.gov (United States)

Doszkocs, Tamas E.

1983-01-01

The National Library of Medicine's Current Information Transfer in English public access online catalog offers unique subject search capabilities--natural-language query input, automatic medical subject headings display, closest match search strategy, ranked document output, dynamic end user feedback for search refinement. References, description…

Computing an Ontological Semantics for a Natural Language Fragment

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Szymczak, Bartlomiej Antoni

tried to establish a domain independent “ontological semantics” for relevant fragments of natural language. The purpose of this research is to develop methods and systems for taking advantage of formal ontologies for the purpose of extracting the meaning contents of texts. This functionality...

Incidence Rate of Canonical vs. Derived Medical Terminology in Natural Language.

Science.gov (United States)

Topac, Vasile; Jurcau, Daniel-Alexandru; Stoicu-Tivadar, Vasile

2015-01-01

Medical terminology appears in the natural language in multiple forms: canonical, derived or inflected form. This research presents an analysis of the form in which medical terminology appears in Romanian and English language. The sources of medical language used for the study are web pages presenting medical information for patients and other lay users. The results show that, in English, medical terminology tends to appear more in canonical form while, in the case of Romanian, it is the opposite. This paper also presents the service that was created to perform this analysis. This tool is available for the general public, and it is designed to be easily extensible, allowing the addition of other languages.

Second Language Aquisition and The Development through Nature-Nurture

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Syahfitri Purnama

2017-10-01

Full Text Available There are some factors regarding which aspect of second language acquisition is affected by individual learner factors, age, learning style. aptitude, motivation, and personality. This research is about English language acquisition of fourth-year child by nature and nurture. The child acquired her second language acquisition at home and also in one of the courses in Jakarta. She schooled by her parents in order to be able to speak English well as a target language for her future time. The purpose of this paper is to see and examine individual learner difference especially in using English as a second language. This study is a library research and retrieved data collected, recorded, transcribed, and analyzed descriptively. The results can be concluded: the child is able to communicate well and also able to construct simple sentences, complex sentences, sentence statement, phrase questions, and explain something when her teacher asks her at school. She is able to communicate by making a simple sentence or compound sentence in well-form (two clauses or three clauses, even though she still not focus to use the past tense form and sometimes she forgets to put bound morpheme -s in third person singular but she can use turn-taking in her utterances. It is a very long process since the child does the second language acquisition. The family and teacher should participate and assist the child, the proven child can learn the first and the second language at the same time.

Systematization and sophistication of a comprehensive sensitivity analysis program. Phase 2

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Oyamada, Kiyoshi; Ikeda, Takao

2004-02-01

This study developed minute estimation by adopting comprehensive sensitivity analytical program for reliability of TRU waste repository concepts in a crystalline rock condition. We examined each components and groundwater scenario of geological repository and prepared systematic bases to examine the reliability from the point of comprehensiveness. Models and data are sophisticated to examine the reliability. Based on an existing TRU waste repository concepts, effects of parameters to nuclide migration were quantitatively classified. Those parameters, that will be decided quantitatively, are such as site character of natural barrier and design specification of engineered barriers. Considering the feasibility of those figures of specifications, reliability is re-examined on combinations of those parameters within a practical range. Future issues are; Comprehensive representation of hybrid geosphere model including the fractured medium and permeable matrix medium. Sophistication of tools to develop the reliable combinations of parameters. It is significant to continue this study because the disposal concepts and specification of TRU nuclides containing waste on various sites shall be determined rationally and safely through these studies. (author)

Does Investors' Sophistication Affect Persistence and Pricing of Discretionary Accruals?

OpenAIRE

Lanfeng Kao

2007-01-01

This paper examines whether the sophistication of market investors influences management's strategy on discretionary accounting choice, and thus changes the persistence of discretionary accruals. The results show that the persistence of discretionary accruals for firms face with naive investors is lower than that for firms face with sophisticated investors. The results also demonstrate that sophisticated investors indeed incorporate the implications of current earnings components into future ...

Marginal Words--Sophisticated Attitudinal Meaning Making Resources in the Vietnamese Language: Implications for the Shaping of Vietnamese Teaching in the Australian Curriculum: Languages (Vietnamese)

Science.gov (United States)

Ngo, Thu Thi Bich

2014-01-01

Evaluation is an important aspect in communication in any language as it not only functions to express language users' evaluative stance but also to construct and maintain relations between interactants. In the teaching of languages in addition to English, paying attention to evaluative language contributes to an understanding of the…

Natural-language processing applied to an ITS interface

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Antonio Gisolfi

1994-12-01

Full Text Available The aim of this paper is to show that with a subset of a natural language, simple systems running on PCs can be developed that can nevertheless be an effective tool for interfacing purposes in the building of an Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS. After presenting the special characteristics of the Smalltalk/V language, which provides an appropriate environment for the development of an interface, the overall architecture of the interface module is discussed. We then show how sentences are parsed by the interface, and how interaction takes place with the user. The knowledge-acquisition phase is subsequently described. Finally, some excerpts from a tutoring session concerned with elementary geometry are discussed, and some of the problems and limitations of the approach are illustrated.

The conceptualization and measurement of cognitive health sophistication.

Science.gov (United States)

Bodie, Graham D; Collins, William B; Jensen, Jakob D; Davis, Lashara A; Guntzviller, Lisa M; King, Andy J

2013-01-01

This article develops a conceptualization and measure of cognitive health sophistication--the complexity of an individual's conceptual knowledge about health. Study 1 provides initial validity evidence for the measure--the Healthy-Unhealthy Other Instrument--by showing its association with other cognitive health constructs indicative of higher health sophistication. Study 2 presents data from a sample of low-income adults to provide evidence that the measure does not depend heavily on health-related vocabulary or ethnicity. Results from both studies suggest that the Healthy-Unhealthy Other Instrument can be used to capture variability in the sophistication or complexity of an individual's health-related schematic structures on the basis of responses to two simple open-ended questions. Methodological advantages of the Healthy-Unhealthy Other Instrument and suggestions for future research are highlighted in the discussion.

Recent advances in modeling languages for pathway maps and computable biological networks.

Science.gov (United States)

Slater, Ted

2014-02-01

As our theories of systems biology grow more sophisticated, the models we use to represent them become larger and more complex. Languages necessarily have the expressivity and flexibility required to represent these models in ways that support high-resolution annotation, and provide for simulation and analysis that are sophisticated enough to allow researchers to master their data in the proper context. These languages also need to facilitate model sharing and collaboration, which is currently best done by using uniform data structures (such as graphs) and language standards. In this brief review, we discuss three of the most recent systems biology modeling languages to appear: BEL, PySB and BCML, and examine how they meet these needs. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

HomeNL: Homecare Assistance in Natural Language. An Intelligent Conversational Agent for Hypertensive Patients Management.

OpenAIRE

Rojas Barahona , Lina Maria; Quaglini , Silvana; Stefanelli , Mario

2009-01-01

International audience; The prospective home-care management will probably of- fer intelligent conversational assistants for supporting patients at home through natural language interfaces. Homecare assistance in natural lan- guage, HomeNL, is a proof-of-concept dialogue system for the manage- ment of patients with hypertension. It follows up a conversation with a patient in which the patient is able to take the initiative. HomeNL pro- cesses natural language, makes an internal representation...

Obfuscation, Learning, and the Evolution of Investor Sophistication

OpenAIRE

Bruce Ian Carlin; Gustavo Manso

2011-01-01

Investor sophistication has lagged behind the growing complexity of retail financial markets. To explore this, we develop a dynamic model to study the interaction between obfuscation and investor sophistication in mutual fund markets. Taking into account different learning mechanisms within the investor population, we characterize the optimal timing of obfuscation for financial institutions who offer retail products. We show that educational initiatives that are directed to facilitate learnin...

Automatic Requirements Specification Extraction from Natural Language (ARSENAL)

Science.gov (United States)

2014-10-01

studies: the Time-Triggered Ethernet (TTEthernet) communication platform used in space, and FAA-Isolette infant incubators used in NICU . We...in space, and FAA-Isolette infant incubators used in Neonatal Intensive Care Units ( NICUs ). We systematically evalu- ated various aspects of ARSENAL...effect, we present the ARSENAL methodology. ARSENAL uses state-of-the-art advances in natural language processing (NLP) and formal methods (FM) to

Managing Fieldwork Data with Toolbox and the Natural Language Toolkit

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Stuart Robinson

2007-06-01

Full Text Available This paper shows how fieldwork data can be managed using the program Toolbox together with the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK for the Python programming language. It provides background information about Toolbox and describes how it can be downloaded and installed. The basic functionality of the program for lexicons and texts is described, and its strengths and weaknesses are reviewed. Its underlying data format is briefly discussed, and Toolbox processing capabilities of NLTK are introduced, showing ways in which it can be used to extend the functionality of Toolbox. This is illustrated with a few simple scripts that demonstrate basic data management tasks relevant to language documentation, such as printing out the contents of a lexicon as HTML.

Using natural language processing techniques to inform research on nanotechnology

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Nastassja A. Lewinski

2015-07-01

Full Text Available Literature in the field of nanotechnology is exponentially increasing with more and more engineered nanomaterials being created, characterized, and tested for performance and safety. With the deluge of published data, there is a need for natural language processing approaches to semi-automate the cataloguing of engineered nanomaterials and their associated physico-chemical properties, performance, exposure scenarios, and biological effects. In this paper, we review the different informatics methods that have been applied to patent mining, nanomaterial/device characterization, nanomedicine, and environmental risk assessment. Nine natural language processing (NLP-based tools were identified: NanoPort, NanoMapper, TechPerceptor, a Text Mining Framework, a Nanodevice Analyzer, a Clinical Trial Document Classifier, Nanotoxicity Searcher, NanoSifter, and NEIMiner. We conclude with recommendations for sharing NLP-related tools through online repositories to broaden participation in nanoinformatics.

Combining Natural Language Processing and Statistical Text Mining: A Study of Specialized versus Common Languages

Science.gov (United States)

Jarman, Jay

2011-01-01

This dissertation focuses on developing and evaluating hybrid approaches for analyzing free-form text in the medical domain. This research draws on natural language processing (NLP) techniques that are used to parse and extract concepts based on a controlled vocabulary. Once important concepts are extracted, additional machine learning algorithms,…

Probabilistic Sophistication, Second Order Stochastic Dominance, and Uncertainty Aversion

OpenAIRE

Simone Cerreia-Vioglio; Fabio Maccheroni; Massimo Marinacci; Luigi Montrucchio

2010-01-01

We study the interplay of probabilistic sophistication, second order stochastic dominance, and uncertainty aversion, three fundamental notions in choice under uncertainty. In particular, our main result, Theorem 2, characterizes uncertainty averse preferences that satisfy second order stochastic dominance, as well as uncertainty averse preferences that are probabilistically sophisticated.

Learning from a Computer Tutor with Natural Language Capabilities

Science.gov (United States)

Michael, Joel; Rovick, Allen; Glass, Michael; Zhou, Yujian; Evens, Martha

2003-01-01

CIRCSIM-Tutor is a computer tutor designed to carry out a natural language dialogue with a medical student. Its domain is the baroreceptor reflex, the part of the cardiovascular system that is responsible for maintaining a constant blood pressure. CIRCSIM-Tutor's interaction with students is modeled after the tutoring behavior of two experienced…

Natural language processing: an introduction.

Science.gov (United States)

Nadkarni, Prakash M; Ohno-Machado, Lucila; Chapman, Wendy W

2011-01-01

To provide an overview and tutorial of natural language processing (NLP) and modern NLP-system design. This tutorial targets the medical informatics generalist who has limited acquaintance with the principles behind NLP and/or limited knowledge of the current state of the art. We describe the historical evolution of NLP, and summarize common NLP sub-problems in this extensive field. We then provide a synopsis of selected highlights of medical NLP efforts. After providing a brief description of common machine-learning approaches that are being used for diverse NLP sub-problems, we discuss how modern NLP architectures are designed, with a summary of the Apache Foundation's Unstructured Information Management Architecture. We finally consider possible future directions for NLP, and reflect on the possible impact of IBM Watson on the medical field.

Selected Topics on Systems Modeling and Natural Language Processing: Editorial Introduction to the Issue 7 of CSIMQ

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Witold Andrzejewski

2016-07-01

Full Text Available The seventh issue of Complex Systems Informatics and Modeling Quarterly presents five papers devoted to two distinct research topics: systems modeling and natural language processing (NLP. Both of these subjects are very important in computer science. Through modeling we can simplify the studied problem by concentrating on only one aspect at a time. Moreover, a properly constructed model allows the modeler to work on higher levels of abstraction and not having to concentrate on details. Since the size and complexity of information systems grows rapidly, creating good models of such systems is crucial. The analysis of natural language is slowly becoming a widely used tool in commerce and day to day life. Opinion mining allows recommender systems to provide accurate recommendations based on user-generated reviews. Speech recognition and NLP are the basis for such widely used personal assistants as Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Google Now. While a lot of work has already been done on natural language processing, the research usually concerns widely used languages, such as English. Consequently, natural language processing in languages other than English is very relevant subject and is addressed in this issue.

Natural Language Processing in Radiology: A Systematic Review.

Science.gov (United States)

Pons, Ewoud; Braun, Loes M M; Hunink, M G Myriam; Kors, Jan A

2016-05-01

Radiological reporting has generated large quantities of digital content within the electronic health record, which is potentially a valuable source of information for improving clinical care and supporting research. Although radiology reports are stored for communication and documentation of diagnostic imaging, harnessing their potential requires efficient and automated information extraction: they exist mainly as free-text clinical narrative, from which it is a major challenge to obtain structured data. Natural language processing (NLP) provides techniques that aid the conversion of text into a structured representation, and thus enables computers to derive meaning from human (ie, natural language) input. Used on radiology reports, NLP techniques enable automatic identification and extraction of information. By exploring the various purposes for their use, this review examines how radiology benefits from NLP. A systematic literature search identified 67 relevant publications describing NLP methods that support practical applications in radiology. This review takes a close look at the individual studies in terms of tasks (ie, the extracted information), the NLP methodology and tools used, and their application purpose and performance results. Additionally, limitations, future challenges, and requirements for advancing NLP in radiology will be discussed. (©) RSNA, 2016 Online supplemental material is available for this article.

The social impact of natural language processing

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Hovy, Dirk; Spruit, Shannon

Research in natural language processing (NLP) used to be mostly performed on anonymous corpora, with the goal of enriching linguistic analysis. Authors were either largely unknown or public figures. As we increasingly use more data from social media, this situation has changed: users are now...... individually identifiable, and the outcome of NLP experiments and applications can have a direct effect on their lives. This change should spawn a debate about the ethical implications of NLP, but until now, the internal discourse in the field has not followed the technological development. This position paper...

Designing Service-Oriented Chatbot Systems Using a Construction Grammar-Driven Natural Language Generation System

OpenAIRE

Jenkins, Marie-Claire

2011-01-01

Service oriented chatbot systems are used to inform users in a conversational manner about a particular service or product on a website. Our research shows that current systems are time consuming to build and not very accurate or satisfying to users. We find that natural language understanding and natural language generation methods are central to creating an e�fficient and useful system. In this thesis we investigate current and past methods in this research area and place particular emph...

Exploiting Lexical Regularities in Designing Natural Language Systems.

Science.gov (United States)

1988-04-01

ELEMENT. PROJECT. TASKN Artificial Inteligence Laboratory A1A4WR NTumet 0) 545 Technology Square Cambridge, MA 02139 Ln *t- CONTROLLING OFFICE NAME AND...RO-RI95 922 EXPLOITING LEXICAL REGULARITIES IN DESIGNING NATURAL 1/1 LANGUAGE SYSTENS(U) MASSACHUSETTS INST OF TECH CAMBRIDGE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE...oes.ary and ftdou.Ip hr Nl wow" L,2This paper presents the lexical component of the START Question Answering system developed at the MIT Artificial

An ontology model for nursing narratives with natural language generation technology.

Science.gov (United States)

Min, Yul Ha; Park, Hyeoun-Ae; Jeon, Eunjoo; Lee, Joo Yun; Jo, Soo Jung

2013-01-01

The purpose of this study was to develop an ontology model to generate nursing narratives as natural as human language from the entity-attribute-value triplets of a detailed clinical model using natural language generation technology. The model was based on the types of information and documentation time of the information along the nursing process. The typesof information are data characterizing the patient status, inferences made by the nurse from the patient data, and nursing actions selected by the nurse to change the patient status. This information was linked to the nursing process based on the time of documentation. We describe a case study illustrating the application of this model in an acute-care setting. The proposed model provides a strategy for designing an electronic nursing record system.

The role of sophisticated accounting system in strategy management

OpenAIRE

Naranjo Gil, David

2004-01-01

Organizations are designing more sophisticated accounting information systems to meet the strategic goals and enhance their performance. This study examines the effect of accounting information system design on the performance of organizations pursuing different strategic priorities. The alignment between sophisticated accounting information systems and organizational strategy is analyzed. The enabling effect of the accounting information system on performance is also examined. Relationships ...

A Visual Language for Protein Design

KAUST Repository

Cox, Robert Sidney

2017-02-08

As protein engineering becomes more sophisticated, practitioners increasingly need to share diagrams for communicating protein designs. To this end, we present a draft visual language, Protein Language, that describes the high-level architecture of an engineered protein with easy-to draw glyphs, intended to be compatible with other biological diagram languages such as SBOL Visual and SBGN. Protein Language consists of glyphs for representing important features (e.g., globular domains, recognition and localization sequences, sites of covalent modification, cleavage and catalysis), rules for composing these glyphs to represent complex architectures, and rules constraining the scaling and styling of diagrams. To support Protein Language we have implemented an extensible web-based software diagram tool, Protein Designer, that uses Protein Language in a

A Visual Language for Protein Design

KAUST Repository

Cox, Robert Sidney; McLaughlin, James Alastair; Grunberg, Raik; Beal, Jacob; Wipat, Anil; Sauro, Herbert M.

2017-01-01

As protein engineering becomes more sophisticated, practitioners increasingly need to share diagrams for communicating protein designs. To this end, we present a draft visual language, Protein Language, that describes the high-level architecture of an engineered protein with easy-to draw glyphs, intended to be compatible with other biological diagram languages such as SBOL Visual and SBGN. Protein Language consists of glyphs for representing important features (e.g., globular domains, recognition and localization sequences, sites of covalent modification, cleavage and catalysis), rules for composing these glyphs to represent complex architectures, and rules constraining the scaling and styling of diagrams. To support Protein Language we have implemented an extensible web-based software diagram tool, Protein Designer, that uses Protein Language in a

Financial Literacy and Financial Sophistication in the Older Population

Science.gov (United States)

Lusardi, Annamaria; Mitchell, Olivia S.; Curto, Vilsa

2017-01-01

Using a special-purpose module implemented in the Health and Retirement Study, we evaluate financial sophistication in the American population over the age of 50. We combine several financial literacy questions into an overall index to highlight which questions best capture financial sophistication and examine the sensitivity of financial literacy responses to framing effects. Results show that many older respondents are not financially sophisticated: they fail to grasp essential aspects of risk diversification, asset valuation, portfolio choice, and investment fees. Subgroups with notable deficits include women, the least educated, non-Whites, and those over age 75. In view of the fact that retirees increasingly must take on responsibility for their own retirement security, such meager levels of knowledge have potentially serious and negative implications. PMID:28553191

Financial Literacy and Financial Sophistication in the Older Population.

Science.gov (United States)

Lusardi, Annamaria; Mitchell, Olivia S; Curto, Vilsa

2014-10-01

Using a special-purpose module implemented in the Health and Retirement Study, we evaluate financial sophistication in the American population over the age of 50. We combine several financial literacy questions into an overall index to highlight which questions best capture financial sophistication and examine the sensitivity of financial literacy responses to framing effects. Results show that many older respondents are not financially sophisticated: they fail to grasp essential aspects of risk diversification, asset valuation, portfolio choice, and investment fees. Subgroups with notable deficits include women, the least educated, non-Whites, and those over age 75. In view of the fact that retirees increasingly must take on responsibility for their own retirement security, such meager levels of knowledge have potentially serious and negative implications.

Advanced applications of natural language processing for performing information extraction

CERN Document Server

Rodrigues, Mário

2015-01-01

This book explains how can be created information extraction (IE) applications that are able to tap the vast amount of relevant information available in natural language sources: Internet pages, official documents such as laws and regulations, books and newspapers, and social web. Readers are introduced to the problem of IE and its current challenges and limitations, supported with examples. The book discusses the need to fill the gap between documents, data, and people, and provides a broad overview of the technology supporting IE. The authors present a generic architecture for developing systems that are able to learn how to extract relevant information from natural language documents, and illustrate how to implement working systems using state-of-the-art and freely available software tools. The book also discusses concrete applications illustrating IE uses.   ·         Provides an overview of state-of-the-art technology in information extraction (IE), discussing achievements and limitations for t...

Linguistic fundamentals for natural language processing 100 essentials from morphology and syntax

CERN Document Server

Bender, Emily M

2013-01-01

Many NLP tasks have at their core a subtask of extracting the dependencies-who did what to whom-from natural language sentences. This task can be understood as the inverse of the problem solved in different ways by diverse human languages, namely, how to indicate the relationship between different parts of a sentence. Understanding how languages solve the problem can be extremely useful in both feature design and error analysis in the application of machine learning to NLP. Likewise, understanding cross-linguistic variation can be important for the design of MT systems and other multilingual a

Programming Languages for Distributed Computing Systems

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Bal, H.E.; Steiner, J.G.; Tanenbaum, A.S.

1989-01-01

When distributed systems first appeared, they were programmed in traditional sequential languages, usually with the addition of a few library procedures for sending and receiving messages. As distributed applications became more commonplace and more sophisticated, this ad hoc approach became less

Paired structures in logical and semiotic models of natural language

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Rodríguez, J. Tinguaro; Franco, Camilo; Montero, Javier

2014-01-01

The evidence coming from cognitive psychology and linguistics shows that pairs of reference concepts (as e.g. good/bad, tall/short, nice/ugly, etc.) play a crucial role in the way we everyday use and understand natural languages in order to analyze reality and make decisions. Different situations...

Natural Language Processing Technologies in Radiology Research and Clinical Applications

Science.gov (United States)

Cai, Tianrun; Giannopoulos, Andreas A.; Yu, Sheng; Kelil, Tatiana; Ripley, Beth; Kumamaru, Kanako K.; Rybicki, Frank J.

2016-01-01

The migration of imaging reports to electronic medical record systems holds great potential in terms of advancing radiology research and practice by leveraging the large volume of data continuously being updated, integrated, and shared. However, there are significant challenges as well, largely due to the heterogeneity of how these data are formatted. Indeed, although there is movement toward structured reporting in radiology (ie, hierarchically itemized reporting with use of standardized terminology), the majority of radiology reports remain unstructured and use free-form language. To effectively “mine” these large datasets for hypothesis testing, a robust strategy for extracting the necessary information is needed. Manual extraction of information is a time-consuming and often unmanageable task. “Intelligent” search engines that instead rely on natural language processing (NLP), a computer-based approach to analyzing free-form text or speech, can be used to automate this data mining task. The overall goal of NLP is to translate natural human language into a structured format (ie, a fixed collection of elements), each with a standardized set of choices for its value, that is easily manipulated by computer programs to (among other things) order into subcategories or query for the presence or absence of a finding. The authors review the fundamentals of NLP and describe various techniques that constitute NLP in radiology, along with some key applications. ©RSNA, 2016 PMID:26761536

Natural Language Processing Technologies in Radiology Research and Clinical Applications.

Science.gov (United States)

Cai, Tianrun; Giannopoulos, Andreas A; Yu, Sheng; Kelil, Tatiana; Ripley, Beth; Kumamaru, Kanako K; Rybicki, Frank J; Mitsouras, Dimitrios

2016-01-01

The migration of imaging reports to electronic medical record systems holds great potential in terms of advancing radiology research and practice by leveraging the large volume of data continuously being updated, integrated, and shared. However, there are significant challenges as well, largely due to the heterogeneity of how these data are formatted. Indeed, although there is movement toward structured reporting in radiology (ie, hierarchically itemized reporting with use of standardized terminology), the majority of radiology reports remain unstructured and use free-form language. To effectively "mine" these large datasets for hypothesis testing, a robust strategy for extracting the necessary information is needed. Manual extraction of information is a time-consuming and often unmanageable task. "Intelligent" search engines that instead rely on natural language processing (NLP), a computer-based approach to analyzing free-form text or speech, can be used to automate this data mining task. The overall goal of NLP is to translate natural human language into a structured format (ie, a fixed collection of elements), each with a standardized set of choices for its value, that is easily manipulated by computer programs to (among other things) order into subcategories or query for the presence or absence of a finding. The authors review the fundamentals of NLP and describe various techniques that constitute NLP in radiology, along with some key applications. ©RSNA, 2016.

Query2Question: Translating Visualization Interaction into Natural Language.

Science.gov (United States)

Nafari, Maryam; Weaver, Chris

2015-06-01

Richly interactive visualization tools are increasingly popular for data exploration and analysis in a wide variety of domains. Existing systems and techniques for recording provenance of interaction focus either on comprehensive automated recording of low-level interaction events or on idiosyncratic manual transcription of high-level analysis activities. In this paper, we present the architecture and translation design of a query-to-question (Q2Q) system that automatically records user interactions and presents them semantically using natural language (written English). Q2Q takes advantage of domain knowledge and uses natural language generation (NLG) techniques to translate and transcribe a progression of interactive visualization states into a visual log of styled text that complements and effectively extends the functionality of visualization tools. We present Q2Q as a means to support a cross-examination process in which questions rather than interactions are the focus of analytic reasoning and action. We describe the architecture and implementation of the Q2Q system, discuss key design factors and variations that effect question generation, and present several visualizations that incorporate Q2Q for analysis in a variety of knowledge domains.

The Impact of Financial Sophistication on Adjustable Rate Mortgage Ownership

Science.gov (United States)

Smith, Hyrum; Finke, Michael S.; Huston, Sandra J.

2011-01-01

The influence of a financial sophistication scale on adjustable-rate mortgage (ARM) borrowing is explored. Descriptive statistics and regression analysis using recent data from the Survey of Consumer Finances reveal that ARM borrowing is driven by both the least and most financially sophisticated households but for different reasons. Less…

Library of sophisticated functions for analysis of nuclear spectra

Science.gov (United States)

Morháč, Miroslav; Matoušek, Vladislav

2009-10-01

In the paper we present compact library for analysis of nuclear spectra. The library consists of sophisticated functions for background elimination, smoothing, peak searching, deconvolution, and peak fitting. The functions can process one- and two-dimensional spectra. The software described in the paper comprises a number of conventional as well as newly developed methods needed to analyze experimental data. Program summaryProgram title: SpecAnalysLib 1.1 Catalogue identifier: AEDZ_v1_0 Program summary URL:http://cpc.cs.qub.ac.uk/summaries/AEDZ_v1_0.html Program obtainable from: CPC Program Library, Queen's University, Belfast, N. Ireland Licensing provisions: Standard CPC licence, http://cpc.cs.qub.ac.uk/licence/licence.html No. of lines in distributed program, including test data, etc.: 42 154 No. of bytes in distributed program, including test data, etc.: 2 379 437 Distribution format: tar.gz Programming language: C++ Computer: Pentium 3 PC 2.4 GHz or higher, Borland C++ Builder v. 6. A precompiled Windows version is included in the distribution package Operating system: Windows 32 bit versions RAM: 10 MB Word size: 32 bits Classification: 17.6 Nature of problem: The demand for advanced highly effective experimental data analysis functions is enormous. The library package represents one approach to give the physicists the possibility to use the advanced routines simply by calling them from their own programs. SpecAnalysLib is a collection of functions for analysis of one- and two-parameter γ-ray spectra, but they can be used for other types of data as well. The library consists of sophisticated functions for background elimination, smoothing, peak searching, deconvolution, and peak fitting. Solution method: The algorithms of background estimation are based on Sensitive Non-linear Iterative Peak (SNIP) clipping algorithm. The smoothing algorithms are based on the convolution of the original data with several types of filters and algorithms based on discrete

Exploring culture, language and the perception of the nature of science

Science.gov (United States)

Sutherland, Dawn

2002-01-01

One dimension of early Canadian education is the attempt of the government to use the education system as an assimilative tool to integrate the First Nations and Me´tis people into Euro-Canadian society. Despite these attempts, many First Nations and Me´tis people retained their culture and their indigenous language. Few science educators have examined First Nations and Western scientific worldviews and the impact they may have on science learning. This study explored the views some First Nations (Cree) and Euro-Canadian Grade-7-level students in Manitoba had about the nature of science. Both qualitative (open-ended questions and interviews) and quantitative (a Likert-scale questionnaire) instruments were used to explore student views. A central hypothesis to this research programme is the possibility that the different world-views of two student populations, Cree and Euro-Canadian, are likely to influence their perceptions of science. This preliminary study explored a range of methodologies to probe the perceptions of the nature of science in these two student populations. It was found that the two cultural groups differed significantly between some of the tenets in a Nature of Scientific Knowledge Scale (NSKS). Cree students significantly differed from Euro-Canadian students on the developmental, testable and unified tenets of the nature of scientific knowledge scale. No significant differences were found in NSKS scores between language groups (Cree students who speak English in the home and those who speak English and Cree or Cree only). The differences found between language groups were primarily in the open-ended questions where preformulated responses were absent. Interviews about critical incidents provided more detailed accounts of the Cree students' perception of the nature of science. The implications of the findings of this study are discussed in relation to the challenges related to research methodology, further areas for investigation, science

Recurrent Artificial Neural Networks and Finite State Natural Language Processing.

Science.gov (United States)

Moisl, Hermann

It is argued that pessimistic assessments of the adequacy of artificial neural networks (ANNs) for natural language processing (NLP) on the grounds that they have a finite state architecture are unjustified, and that their adequacy in this regard is an empirical issue. First, arguments that counter standard objections to finite state NLP on the…

Informatics in radiology: RADTF: a semantic search-enabled, natural language processor-generated radiology teaching file.

Science.gov (United States)

Do, Bao H; Wu, Andrew; Biswal, Sandip; Kamaya, Aya; Rubin, Daniel L

2010-11-01

Storing and retrieving radiology cases is an important activity for education and clinical research, but this process can be time-consuming. In the process of structuring reports and images into organized teaching files, incidental pathologic conditions not pertinent to the primary teaching point can be omitted, as when a user saves images of an aortic dissection case but disregards the incidental osteoid osteoma. An alternate strategy for identifying teaching cases is text search of reports in radiology information systems (RIS), but retrieved reports are unstructured, teaching-related content is not highlighted, and patient identifying information is not removed. Furthermore, searching unstructured reports requires sophisticated retrieval methods to achieve useful results. An open-source, RadLex(®)-compatible teaching file solution called RADTF, which uses natural language processing (NLP) methods to process radiology reports, was developed to create a searchable teaching resource from the RIS and the picture archiving and communication system (PACS). The NLP system extracts and de-identifies teaching-relevant statements from full reports to generate a stand-alone database, thus converting existing RIS archives into an on-demand source of teaching material. Using RADTF, the authors generated a semantic search-enabled, Web-based radiology archive containing over 700,000 cases with millions of images. RADTF combines a compact representation of the teaching-relevant content in radiology reports and a versatile search engine with the scale of the entire RIS-PACS collection of case material. ©RSNA, 2010

Cognitive Load and Strategic Sophistication

OpenAIRE

Allred, Sarah; Duffy, Sean; Smith, John

2013-01-01

We study the relationship between the cognitive load manipulation and strategic sophistication. The cognitive load manipulation is designed to reduce the subject's cognitive resources that are available for deliberation on a choice. In our experiment, subjects are placed under a large cognitive load (given a difficult number to remember) or a low cognitive load (given a number which is not difficult to remember). Subsequently, the subjects play a one-shot game then they are asked to recall...

Teaching the tacit knowledge of programming to noviceswith natural language tutoring

Science.gov (United States)

Lane, H. Chad; Vanlehn, Kurt

2005-09-01

For beginning programmers, inadequate problem solving and planning skills are among the most salient of their weaknesses. In this paper, we test the efficacy of natural language tutoring to teach and scaffold acquisition of these skills. We describe ProPL (Pro-PELL), a dialogue-based intelligent tutoring system that elicits goal decompositions and program plans from students in natural language. The system uses a variety of tutoring tactics that leverage students' intuitive understandings of the problem, how it might be solved, and the underlying concepts of programming. We report the results of a small-scale evaluation comparing students who used ProPL with a control group who read the same content. Our primary findings are that students who received tutoring from ProPL seem to have developed an improved ability to solve the composition problem and displayed behaviors that suggest they were able to think at greater levels of abstraction than students in the read-only group.

Moral foundations and political attitudes: The moderating role of political sophistication.

Science.gov (United States)

Milesi, Patrizia

2016-08-01

Political attitudes can be associated with moral concerns. This research investigated whether people's level of political sophistication moderates this association. Based on the Moral Foundations Theory, this article examined whether political sophistication moderates the extent to which reliance on moral foundations, as categories of moral concerns, predicts judgements about policy positions. With this aim, two studies examined four policy positions shown by previous research to be best predicted by the endorsement of Sanctity, that is, the category of moral concerns focused on the preservation of physical and spiritual purity. The results showed that reliance on Sanctity predicted political sophisticates' judgements, as opposed to those of unsophisticates, on policy positions dealing with equal rights for same-sex and unmarried couples and with euthanasia. Political sophistication also interacted with Fairness endorsement, which includes moral concerns for equal treatment of everybody and reciprocity, in predicting judgements about equal rights for unmarried couples, and interacted with reliance on Authority, which includes moral concerns for obedience and respect for traditional authorities, in predicting opposition to stem cell research. Those findings suggest that, at least for these particular issues, endorsement of moral foundations can be associated with political attitudes more strongly among sophisticates than unsophisticates. © 2015 International Union of Psychological Science.

Academic language and the challenge of reading for learning about science.

Science.gov (United States)

Snow, Catherine E

2010-04-23

A major challenge to students learning science is the academic language in which science is written. Academic language is designed to be concise, precise, and authoritative. To achieve these goals, it uses sophisticated words and complex grammatical constructions that can disrupt reading comprehension and block learning. Students need help in learning academic vocabulary and how to process academic language if they are to become independent learners of science.

Mathematical Formula Search using Natural Language Queries

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

YANG, S.

2014-11-01

Full Text Available This paper presents how to search mathematical formulae written in MathML when given plain words as a query. Since the proposed method allows natural language queries like the traditional Information Retrieval for the mathematical formula search, users do not need to enter any complicated math symbols and to use any formula input tool. For this, formula data is converted into plain texts, and features are extracted from the converted texts. In our experiments, we achieve an outstanding performance, a MRR of 0.659. In addition, we introduce how to utilize formula classification for formula search. By using class information, we finally achieve an improved performance, a MRR of 0.690.

The social impact of natural language processing

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Hovy, Dirk; Spruit, Shannon

Research in natural language processing (NLP) used to be mostly performed on anonymous corpora, with the goal of enriching linguistic analysis. Authors were either largely unknown or public figures. As we increasingly use more data from social media, this situation has changed: users are now...... individually identifiable, and the outcome of NLP experiments and applications can have a direct effect on their lives. This change should spawn a debate about the ethical implications of NLP, but until now, the internal discourse in the field has not followed the technological development. This position paper...... identifies a number of social implications that NLP research may have, and discusses their ethical significance, as well as ways to address them....

Aristotle and Social-Epistemic Rhetoric: The Systematizing of the Sophistic Legacy.

Science.gov (United States)

Allen, James E.

While Aristotle's philosophical views are more foundational than those of many of the Older Sophists, Aristotle's rhetorical theories inherit and incorporate many of the central tenets ascribed to Sophistic rhetoric, albeit in a more systematic fashion, as represented in the "Rhetoric." However, Aristotle was more than just a rhetorical…

Science Language Accommodation in Elementary School Read-Alouds

Science.gov (United States)

Glass, Rory; Oliveira, Alandeom W.

2014-03-01

This study examines the pedagogical functions of accommodation (i.e. provision of simplified science speech) in science read-aloud sessions facilitated by five elementary teachers. We conceive of read-alouds as communicative events wherein teachers, faced with the task of orally delivering a science text of relatively high linguistic complexity, open up an alternate channel of communication, namely oral discussion. By doing so, teachers grant students access to a simplified linguistic input, a strategy designed to promote student comprehension of the textual contents of children's science books. It was found that nearly half (46%) of the read-aloud time was allotted to discussions with an increased percentage of less sophisticated words and reduced use of more sophisticated vocabulary than found in the books through communicative strategies such as simplified rewording, simplified definition, and simplified questioning. Further, aloud reading of more linguistically complex books required longer periods of discussion and an increased degree of teacher oral input and accommodation. We also found evidence of reversed simplification (i.e. sophistication), leading to student uptake of scientific language. The main significance of this study is that it reveals that teacher talk serves two often competing pedagogical functions (accessible communication of scientific information to students and promotion of student acquisition of the specialized language of science). It also underscores the importance of giving analytical consideration to the simplification-sophistication dimension of science classroom discourse as well as the potential of computer-based analysis of classroom discourse to inform science teaching.

Box: Natural Language Processing Research Using Amazon Web Services

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Axelrod Amittai

2015-10-01

Full Text Available We present a publicly-available state-of-the-art research and development platform for Machine Translation and Natural Language Processing that runs on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. This provides a standardized research environment for all users, and enables perfect reproducibility and compatibility. Box also enables users to use their hardware budget to avoid the management and logistical overhead of maintaining a research lab, yet still participate in global research community with the same state-of-the-art tools.

The International English Language Testing System (IELTS): Its Nature and Development.

Science.gov (United States)

Ingram, D. E.

The nature and development of the recently released International English Language Testing System (IELTS) instrument are described. The test is the result of a joint Australian-British project to develop a new test for use with foreign students planning to study in English-speaking countries. It is expected that the modular instrument will become…

On the Thematic Nature of the Subjunctive in the Romance Languages.

Science.gov (United States)

Gerzymisch-Arbogast, Heidrun

1993-01-01

A theoretical discussion is offered on whether the subjunctive in the Romance languages is by nature thematic, as suggested in previous studies. English and Spanish samples are used to test the hypothesis; one conclusion is that the subjunctive seems to offer speaker-related information and may express the intensity of the speaker's involvement.…

Quantization, Frobenius and Bi algebras from the Categorical Framework of Quantum Mechanics to Natural Language Semantics

Science.gov (United States)

Sadrzadeh, Mehrnoosh

2017-07-01

Compact Closed categories and Frobenius and Bi algebras have been applied to model and reason about Quantum protocols. The same constructions have also been applied to reason about natural language semantics under the name: ``categorical distributional compositional'' semantics, or in short, the ``DisCoCat'' model. This model combines the statistical vector models of word meaning with the compositional models of grammatical structure. It has been applied to natural language tasks such as disambiguation, paraphrasing and entailment of phrases and sentences. The passage from the grammatical structure to vectors is provided by a functor, similar to the Quantization functor of Quantum Field Theory. The original DisCoCat model only used compact closed categories. Later, Frobenius algebras were added to it to model long distance dependancies such as relative pronouns. Recently, bialgebras have been added to the pack to reason about quantifiers. This paper reviews these constructions and their application to natural language semantics. We go over the theory and present some of the core experimental results.

Modelling the phonotactic structure of natural language words with simple recurrent networks

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Stoianov, [No Value; Nerbonne, J; Bouma, H; Coppen, PA; vanHalteren, H; Teunissen, L

1998-01-01

Simple Recurrent Networks (SRN) are Neural Network (connectionist) models able to process natural language. Phonotactics concerns the order of symbols in words. We continued an earlier unsuccessful trial to model the phonotactics of Dutch words with SRNs. In order to overcome the previously reported

Adult language learning after minimal exposure to an unknown natural language

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Gullberg, M.; Robert, L.; Dimroth, C.; Veroude, K.; Indefrey, P.

2010-01-01

Despite the literature on the role of input in adult second-language (L2) acquisition and on artificial and statistical language learning, surprisingly little is known about how adults break into a new language in the wild. This article reports on a series of behavioral and neuroimaging studies that

The predictors of economic sophistication: media, interpersonal communication and negative economic experiences

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Kalogeropoulos, A.; Albæk, E.; de Vreese, C.H.; van Dalen, A.

2015-01-01

In analogy to political sophistication, it is imperative that citizens have a certain level of economic sophistication, especially in times of heated debates about the economy. This study examines the impact of different influences (media, interpersonal communication and personal experiences) on

The application of natural language processing to augmentative and alternative communication.

Science.gov (United States)

Higginbotham, D Jeffery; Lesher, Gregory W; Moulton, Bryan J; Roark, Brian

2011-01-01

Significant progress has been made in the application of natural language processing (NLP) to augmentative and alternative communication (AAC), particularly in the areas of interface design and word prediction. This article will survey the current state-of-the-science of NLP in AAC and discuss its future applications for the development of next generation of AAC technology.

A Qualitative Analysis Framework Using Natural Language Processing and Graph Theory

Science.gov (United States)

Tierney, Patrick J.

2012-01-01

This paper introduces a method of extending natural language-based processing of qualitative data analysis with the use of a very quantitative tool--graph theory. It is not an attempt to convert qualitative research to a positivist approach with a mathematical black box, nor is it a "graphical solution". Rather, it is a method to help qualitative…

Combining Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing to Assess Literary Text Comprehension

Science.gov (United States)

Balyan, Renu; McCarthy, Kathryn S.; McNamara, Danielle S.

2017-01-01

This study examined how machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) techniques can be leveraged to assess the interpretive behavior that is required for successful literary text comprehension. We compared the accuracy of seven different machine learning classification algorithms in predicting human ratings of student essays about…

Using Edit Distance to Analyse Errors in a Natural Language to Logic Translation Corpus

Science.gov (United States)

Barker-Plummer, Dave; Dale, Robert; Cox, Richard; Romanczuk, Alex

2012-01-01

We have assembled a large corpus of student submissions to an automatic grading system, where the subject matter involves the translation of natural language sentences into propositional logic. Of the 2.3 million translation instances in the corpus, 286,000 (approximately 12%) are categorized as being in error. We want to understand the nature of…

Toward a Theory-Based Natural Language Capability in Robots and Other Embodied Agents: Evaluating Hausser's SLIM Theory and Database Semantics

Science.gov (United States)

Burk, Robin K.

2010-01-01

Computational natural language understanding and generation have been a goal of artificial intelligence since McCarthy, Minsky, Rochester and Shannon first proposed to spend the summer of 1956 studying this and related problems. Although statistical approaches dominate current natural language applications, two current research trends bring…

Detecting inpatient falls by using natural language processing of electronic medical records

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Toyabe Shin-ichi

2012-12-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background Incident reporting is the most common method for detecting adverse events in a hospital. However, under-reporting or non-reporting and delay in submission of reports are problems that prevent early detection of serious adverse events. The aim of this study was to determine whether it is possible to promptly detect serious injuries after inpatient falls by using a natural language processing method and to determine which data source is the most suitable for this purpose. Methods We tried to detect adverse events from narrative text data of electronic medical records by using a natural language processing method. We made syntactic category decision rules to detect inpatient falls from text data in electronic medical records. We compared how often the true fall events were recorded in various sources of data including progress notes, discharge summaries, image order entries and incident reports. We applied the rules to these data sources and compared F-measures to detect falls between these data sources with reference to the results of a manual chart review. The lag time between event occurrence and data submission and the degree of injury were compared. Results We made 170 syntactic rules to detect inpatient falls by using a natural language processing method. Information on true fall events was most frequently recorded in progress notes (100%, incident reports (65.0% and image order entries (12.5%. However, F-measure to detect falls using the rules was poor when using progress notes (0.12 and discharge summaries (0.24 compared with that when using incident reports (1.00 and image order entries (0.91. Since the results suggested that incident reports and image order entries were possible data sources for prompt detection of serious falls, we focused on a comparison of falls found by incident reports and image order entries. Injury caused by falls found by image order entries was significantly more severe than falls detected by

PAUL AND SOPHISTIC RHETORIC: A PERSPECTIVE ON HIS ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

use of modern rhetorical theories but analyses the letter in terms of the clas- ..... If a critical reader would have had the traditional anti-sophistic arsenal ..... pressions and that 'rhetoric' is mainly a matter of communicating these thoughts.

Visual statistical learning is related to natural language ability in adults: An ERP study.

Science.gov (United States)

Daltrozzo, Jerome; Emerson, Samantha N; Deocampo, Joanne; Singh, Sonia; Freggens, Marjorie; Branum-Martin, Lee; Conway, Christopher M

2017-03-01

Statistical learning (SL) is believed to enable language acquisition by allowing individuals to learn regularities within linguistic input. However, neural evidence supporting a direct relationship between SL and language ability is scarce. We investigated whether there are associations between event-related potential (ERP) correlates of SL and language abilities while controlling for the general level of selective attention. Seventeen adults completed tests of visual SL, receptive vocabulary, grammatical ability, and sentence completion. Response times and ERPs showed that SL is related to receptive vocabulary and grammatical ability. ERPs indicated that the relationship between SL and grammatical ability was independent of attention while the association between SL and receptive vocabulary depended on attention. The implications of these dissociative relationships in terms of underlying mechanisms of SL and language are discussed. These results further elucidate the cognitive nature of the links between SL mechanisms and language abilities. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Quantization, Frobenius and Bi Algebras from the Categorical Framework of Quantum Mechanics to Natural Language Semantics

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh

2017-07-01

Full Text Available Compact Closed categories and Frobenius and Bi algebras have been applied to model and reason about Quantum protocols. The same constructions have also been applied to reason about natural language semantics under the name: “categorical distributional compositional” semantics, or in short, the “DisCoCat” model. This model combines the statistical vector models of word meaning with the compositional models of grammatical structure. It has been applied to natural language tasks such as disambiguation, paraphrasing and entailment of phrases and sentences. The passage from the grammatical structure to vectors is provided by a functor, similar to the Quantization functor of Quantum Field Theory. The original DisCoCat model only used compact closed categories. Later, Frobenius algebras were added to it to model long distance dependancies such as relative pronouns. Recently, bialgebras have been added to the pack to reason about quantifiers. This paper reviews these constructions and their application to natural language semantics. We go over the theory and present some of the core experimental results.

Mathematics and the Laws of Nature Developing the Language of Science (Revised Edition)

CERN Document Server

Tabak, John

2011-01-01

Mathematics and the Laws of Nature, Revised Edition describes the evolution of the idea that nature can be described in the language of mathematics. Colorful chapters explore the earliest attempts to apply deductive methods to the study of the natural world. This revised resource goes on to examine the development of classical conservation laws, including the conservation of momentum, the conservation of mass, and the conservation of energy. Chapters have been updated and revised to reflect recent information, including the mathematical pioneers who introduced new ideas about what it meant to

Comparative study on the customization of natural language interfaces to databases.

Science.gov (United States)

Pazos R, Rodolfo A; Aguirre L, Marco A; González B, Juan J; Martínez F, José A; Pérez O, Joaquín; Verástegui O, Andrés A

2016-01-01

In the last decades the popularity of natural language interfaces to databases (NLIDBs) has increased, because in many cases information obtained from them is used for making important business decisions. Unfortunately, the complexity of their customization by database administrators make them difficult to use. In order for a NLIDB to obtain a high percentage of correctly translated queries, it is necessary that it is correctly customized for the database to be queried. In most cases the performance reported in NLIDB literature is the highest possible; i.e., the performance obtained when the interfaces were customized by the implementers. However, for end users it is more important the performance that the interface can yield when the NLIDB is customized by someone different from the implementers. Unfortunately, there exist very few articles that report NLIDB performance when the NLIDBs are not customized by the implementers. This article presents a semantically-enriched data dictionary (which permits solving many of the problems that occur when translating from natural language to SQL) and an experiment in which two groups of undergraduate students customized our NLIDB and English language frontend (ELF), considered one of the best available commercial NLIDBs. The experimental results show that, when customized by the first group, our NLIDB obtained a 44.69 % of correctly answered queries and ELF 11.83 % for the ATIS database, and when customized by the second group, our NLIDB attained 77.05 % and ELF 13.48 %. The performance attained by our NLIDB, when customized by ourselves was 90 %.

A semantic-based approach for querying linked data using natural language

KAUST Repository

Paredes-Valverde, Mario André s; Valencia-Garcí a, Rafael; Rodriguez-Garcia, Miguel Angel; Colomo-Palacios, Ricardo; Alor-Herná ndez, Giner

2016-01-01

The semantic Web aims to provide to Web information with a well-defined meaning and make it understandable not only by humans but also by computers, thus allowing the automation, integration and reuse of high-quality information across different applications. However, current information retrieval mechanisms for semantic knowledge bases are intended to be only used by expert users. In this work, we propose a natural language interface that allows non-expert users the access to this kind of information through formulating queries in natural language. The present approach uses a domain-independent ontology model to represent the question's structure and context. Also, this model allows determination of the answer type expected by the user based on a proposed question classification. To prove the effectiveness of our approach, we have conducted an evaluation in the music domain using LinkedBrainz, an effort to provide the MusicBrainz information as structured data on the Web by means of Semantic Web technologies. Our proposal obtained encouraging results based on the F-measure metric, ranging from 0.74 to 0.82 for a corpus of questions generated by a group of real-world end users. © The Author(s) 2015.

A semantic-based approach for querying linked data using natural language

KAUST Repository

Paredes-Valverde, Mario Andrés

2016-01-11

The semantic Web aims to provide to Web information with a well-defined meaning and make it understandable not only by humans but also by computers, thus allowing the automation, integration and reuse of high-quality information across different applications. However, current information retrieval mechanisms for semantic knowledge bases are intended to be only used by expert users. In this work, we propose a natural language interface that allows non-expert users the access to this kind of information through formulating queries in natural language. The present approach uses a domain-independent ontology model to represent the question\\'s structure and context. Also, this model allows determination of the answer type expected by the user based on a proposed question classification. To prove the effectiveness of our approach, we have conducted an evaluation in the music domain using LinkedBrainz, an effort to provide the MusicBrainz information as structured data on the Web by means of Semantic Web technologies. Our proposal obtained encouraging results based on the F-measure metric, ranging from 0.74 to 0.82 for a corpus of questions generated by a group of real-world end users. © The Author(s) 2015.

A novel tablet computer platform for advanced language mapping during awake craniotomy procedures.

Science.gov (United States)

Morrison, Melanie A; Tam, Fred; Garavaglia, Marco M; Golestanirad, Laleh; Hare, Gregory M T; Cusimano, Michael D; Schweizer, Tom A; Das, Sunit; Graham, Simon J

2016-04-01

A computerized platform has been developed to enhance behavioral testing during intraoperative language mapping in awake craniotomy procedures. The system is uniquely compatible with the environmental demands of both the operating room and preoperative functional MRI (fMRI), thus providing standardized testing toward improving spatial agreement between the 2 brain mapping techniques. Details of the platform architecture, its advantages over traditional testing methods, and its use for language mapping are described. Four illustrative cases demonstrate the efficacy of using the testing platform to administer sophisticated language paradigms, and the spatial agreement between intraoperative mapping and preoperative fMRI results. The testing platform substantially improved the ability of the surgeon to detect and characterize language deficits. Use of a written word generation task to assess language production helped confirm areas of speech apraxia and speech arrest that were inadequately characterized or missed with the use of traditional paradigms, respectively. Preoperative fMRI of the analogous writing task was also assistive, displaying excellent spatial agreement with intraoperative mapping in all 4 cases. Sole use of traditional testing paradigms can be limiting during awake craniotomy procedures. Comprehensive assessment of language function will require additional use of more sophisticated and ecologically valid testing paradigms. The platform presented here provides a means to do so.

Speech perception and reading: two parallel modes of understanding language and implications for acquiring literacy naturally.

Science.gov (United States)

Massaro, Dominic W

2012-01-01

I review 2 seminal research reports published in this journal during its second decade more than a century ago. Given psychology's subdisciplines, they would not normally be reviewed together because one involves reading and the other speech perception. The small amount of interaction between these domains might have limited research and theoretical progress. In fact, the 2 early research reports revealed common processes involved in these 2 forms of language processing. Their illustration of the role of Wundt's apperceptive process in reading and speech perception anticipated descriptions of contemporary theories of pattern recognition, such as the fuzzy logical model of perception. Based on the commonalities between reading and listening, one can question why they have been viewed so differently. It is commonly believed that learning to read requires formal instruction and schooling, whereas spoken language is acquired from birth onward through natural interactions with people who talk. Most researchers and educators believe that spoken language is acquired naturally from birth onward and even prenatally. Learning to read, on the other hand, is not possible until the child has acquired spoken language, reaches school age, and receives formal instruction. If an appropriate form of written text is made available early in a child's life, however, the current hypothesis is that reading will also be learned inductively and emerge naturally, with no significant negative consequences. If this proposal is true, it should soon be possible to create an interactive system, Technology Assisted Reading Acquisition, to allow children to acquire literacy naturally.

Natural language processing-based COTS software and related technologies survey.

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Stickland, Michael G.; Conrad, Gregory N.; Eaton, Shelley M.

2003-09-01

Natural language processing-based knowledge management software, traditionally developed for security organizations, is now becoming commercially available. An informal survey was conducted to discover and examine current NLP and related technologies and potential applications for information retrieval, information extraction, summarization, categorization, terminology management, link analysis, and visualization for possible implementation at Sandia National Laboratories. This report documents our current understanding of the technologies, lists software vendors and their products, and identifies potential applications of these technologies.

Modeling Coevolution between Language and Memory Capacity during Language Origin

Science.gov (United States)

Gong, Tao; Shuai, Lan

2015-01-01

Memory is essential to many cognitive tasks including language. Apart from empirical studies of memory effects on language acquisition and use, there lack sufficient evolutionary explorations on whether a high level of memory capacity is prerequisite for language and whether language origin could influence memory capacity. In line with evolutionary theories that natural selection refined language-related cognitive abilities, we advocated a coevolution scenario between language and memory capacity, which incorporated the genetic transmission of individual memory capacity, cultural transmission of idiolects, and natural and cultural selections on individual reproduction and language teaching. To illustrate the coevolution dynamics, we adopted a multi-agent computational model simulating the emergence of lexical items and simple syntax through iterated communications. Simulations showed that: along with the origin of a communal language, an initially-low memory capacity for acquired linguistic knowledge was boosted; and such coherent increase in linguistic understandability and memory capacities reflected a language-memory coevolution; and such coevolution stopped till memory capacities became sufficient for language communications. Statistical analyses revealed that the coevolution was realized mainly by natural selection based on individual communicative success in cultural transmissions. This work elaborated the biology-culture parallelism of language evolution, demonstrated the driving force of culturally-constituted factors for natural selection of individual cognitive abilities, and suggested that the degree difference in language-related cognitive abilities between humans and nonhuman animals could result from a coevolution with language. PMID:26544876

Language related differences of the sustained response evoked by natural speech sounds.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Christina Siu-Dschu Fan

Full Text Available In tonal languages, such as Mandarin Chinese, the pitch contour of vowels discriminates lexical meaning, which is not the case in non-tonal languages such as German. Recent data provide evidence that pitch processing is influenced by language experience. However, there are still many open questions concerning the representation of such phonological and language-related differences at the level of the auditory cortex (AC. Using magnetoencephalography (MEG, we recorded transient and sustained auditory evoked fields (AEF in native Chinese and German speakers to investigate language related phonological and semantic aspects in the processing of acoustic stimuli. AEF were elicited by spoken meaningful and meaningless syllables, by vowels, and by a French horn tone. Speech sounds were recorded from a native speaker and showed frequency-modulations according to the pitch-contours of Mandarin. The sustained field (SF evoked by natural speech signals was significantly larger for Chinese than for German listeners. In contrast, the SF elicited by a horn tone was not significantly different between groups. Furthermore, the SF of Chinese subjects was larger when evoked by meaningful syllables compared to meaningless ones, but there was no significant difference regarding whether vowels were part of the Chinese phonological system or not. Moreover, the N100m gave subtle but clear evidence that for Chinese listeners other factors than purely physical properties play a role in processing meaningful signals. These findings show that the N100 and the SF generated in Heschl's gyrus are influenced by language experience, which suggests that AC activity related to specific pitch contours of vowels is influenced in a top-down fashion by higher, language related areas. Such interactions are in line with anatomical findings and neuroimaging data, as well as with the dual-stream model of language of Hickok and Poeppel that highlights the close and reciprocal interaction

Language related differences of the sustained response evoked by natural speech sounds.

Science.gov (United States)

Fan, Christina Siu-Dschu; Zhu, Xingyu; Dosch, Hans Günter; von Stutterheim, Christiane; Rupp, André

2017-01-01

In tonal languages, such as Mandarin Chinese, the pitch contour of vowels discriminates lexical meaning, which is not the case in non-tonal languages such as German. Recent data provide evidence that pitch processing is influenced by language experience. However, there are still many open questions concerning the representation of such phonological and language-related differences at the level of the auditory cortex (AC). Using magnetoencephalography (MEG), we recorded transient and sustained auditory evoked fields (AEF) in native Chinese and German speakers to investigate language related phonological and semantic aspects in the processing of acoustic stimuli. AEF were elicited by spoken meaningful and meaningless syllables, by vowels, and by a French horn tone. Speech sounds were recorded from a native speaker and showed frequency-modulations according to the pitch-contours of Mandarin. The sustained field (SF) evoked by natural speech signals was significantly larger for Chinese than for German listeners. In contrast, the SF elicited by a horn tone was not significantly different between groups. Furthermore, the SF of Chinese subjects was larger when evoked by meaningful syllables compared to meaningless ones, but there was no significant difference regarding whether vowels were part of the Chinese phonological system or not. Moreover, the N100m gave subtle but clear evidence that for Chinese listeners other factors than purely physical properties play a role in processing meaningful signals. These findings show that the N100 and the SF generated in Heschl's gyrus are influenced by language experience, which suggests that AC activity related to specific pitch contours of vowels is influenced in a top-down fashion by higher, language related areas. Such interactions are in line with anatomical findings and neuroimaging data, as well as with the dual-stream model of language of Hickok and Poeppel that highlights the close and reciprocal interaction between

Using Open Geographic Data to Generate Natural Language Descriptions for Hydrological Sensor Networks.

Science.gov (United States)

Molina, Martin; Sanchez-Soriano, Javier; Corcho, Oscar

2015-07-03

Providing descriptions of isolated sensors and sensor networks in natural language, understandable by the general public, is useful to help users find relevant sensors and analyze sensor data. In this paper, we discuss the feasibility of using geographic knowledge from public databases available on the Web (such as OpenStreetMap, Geonames, or DBpedia) to automatically construct such descriptions. We present a general method that uses such information to generate sensor descriptions in natural language. The results of the evaluation of our method in a hydrologic national sensor network showed that this approach is feasible and capable of generating adequate sensor descriptions with a lower development effort compared to other approaches. In the paper we also analyze certain problems that we found in public databases (e.g., heterogeneity, non-standard use of labels, or rigid search methods) and their impact in the generation of sensor descriptions.

Using Open Geographic Data to Generate Natural Language Descriptions for Hydrological Sensor Networks

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Martin Molina

2015-07-01

Full Text Available Providing descriptions of isolated sensors and sensor networks in natural language, understandable by the general public, is useful to help users find relevant sensors and analyze sensor data. In this paper, we discuss the feasibility of using geographic knowledge from public databases available on the Web (such as OpenStreetMap, Geonames, or DBpedia to automatically construct such descriptions. We present a general method that uses such information to generate sensor descriptions in natural language. The results of the evaluation of our method in a hydrologic national sensor network showed that this approach is feasible and capable of generating adequate sensor descriptions with a lower development effort compared to other approaches. In the paper we also analyze certain problems that we found in public databases (e.g., heterogeneity, non-standard use of labels, or rigid search methods and their impact in the generation of sensor descriptions.

Isocratean Discourse Theory and Neo-Sophistic Pedagogy: Implications for the Composition Classroom.

Science.gov (United States)

Blair, Kristine L.

With the recent interest in the fifth century B.C. theories of Protagoras and Gorgias come assumptions about the philosophical affinity of the Greek educator Isocrates to this pair of older sophists. Isocratean education in discourse, with its emphasis on collaborative political discourse, falls within recent definitions of a sophist curriculum.…

Neuroimaging and Research into Second Language Acquisition

Science.gov (United States)

Sabourin, Laura

2009-01-01

Neuroimaging techniques are becoming not only more and more sophisticated but are also coming to be increasingly accessible to researchers. One thing that one should take note of is the potential of neuroimaging research within second language acquisition (SLA) to contribute to issues pertaining to the plasticity of the adult brain and to general…

SMEs and new ventures need business model sophistication

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Kesting, Peter; Günzel-Jensen, Franziska

2015-01-01

, and Spreadshirt, this article develops a framework that introduces five business model sophistication strategies: (1) uncover additional functions of your product, (2) identify strategic benefits for third parties, (3) take advantage of economies of scope, (4) utilize cross-selling opportunities, and (5) involve...

BT-Nurse: computer generation of natural language shift summaries from complex heterogeneous medical data.

Science.gov (United States)

Hunter, James; Freer, Yvonne; Gatt, Albert; Reiter, Ehud; Sripada, Somayajulu; Sykes, Cindy; Westwater, Dave

2011-01-01

The BT-Nurse system uses data-to-text technology to automatically generate a natural language nursing shift summary in a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). The summary is solely based on data held in an electronic patient record system, no additional data-entry is required. BT-Nurse was tested for two months in the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh NICU. Nurses were asked to rate the understandability, accuracy, and helpfulness of the computer-generated summaries; they were also asked for free-text comments about the summaries. The nurses found the majority of the summaries to be understandable, accurate, and helpful (pgenerated summaries. In conclusion, natural language NICU shift summaries can be automatically generated from an electronic patient record, but our proof-of-concept software needs considerable additional development work before it can be deployed.

Harnessing Biomedical Natural Language Processing Tools to Identify Medicinal Plant Knowledge from Historical Texts.

Science.gov (United States)

Sharma, Vivekanand; Law, Wayne; Balick, Michael J; Sarkar, Indra Neil

2017-01-01

The growing amount of data describing historical medicinal uses of plants from digitization efforts provides the opportunity to develop systematic approaches for identifying potential plant-based therapies. However, the task of cataloguing plant use information from natural language text is a challenging task for ethnobotanists. To date, there have been only limited adoption of informatics approaches used for supporting the identification of ethnobotanical information associated with medicinal uses. This study explored the feasibility of using biomedical terminologies and natural language processing approaches for extracting relevant plant-associated therapeutic use information from historical biodiversity literature collection available from the Biodiversity Heritage Library. The results from this preliminary study suggest that there is potential utility of informatics methods to identify medicinal plant knowledge from digitized resources as well as highlight opportunities for improvement.

Suicide Note Classification Using Natural Language Processing: A Content Analysis.

Science.gov (United States)

Pestian, John; Nasrallah, Henry; Matykiewicz, Pawel; Bennett, Aurora; Leenaars, Antoon

2010-08-04

Suicide is the second leading cause of death among 25-34 year olds and the third leading cause of death among 15-25 year olds in the United States. In the Emergency Department, where suicidal patients often present, estimating the risk of repeated attempts is generally left to clinical judgment. This paper presents our second attempt to determine the role of computational algorithms in understanding a suicidal patient's thoughts, as represented by suicide notes. We focus on developing methods of natural language processing that distinguish between genuine and elicited suicide notes. We hypothesize that machine learning algorithms can categorize suicide notes as well as mental health professionals and psychiatric physician trainees do. The data used are comprised of suicide notes from 33 suicide completers and matched to 33 elicited notes from healthy control group members. Eleven mental health professionals and 31 psychiatric trainees were asked to decide if a note was genuine or elicited. Their decisions were compared to nine different machine-learning algorithms. The results indicate that trainees accurately classified notes 49% of the time, mental health professionals accurately classified notes 63% of the time, and the best machine learning algorithm accurately classified the notes 78% of the time. This is an important step in developing an evidence-based predictor of repeated suicide attempts because it shows that natural language processing can aid in distinguishing between classes of suicidal notes.

A Cognitive Neural Architecture Able to Learn and Communicate through Natural Language.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Bruno Golosio

Full Text Available Communicative interactions involve a kind of procedural knowledge that is used by the human brain for processing verbal and nonverbal inputs and for language production. Although considerable work has been done on modeling human language abilities, it has been difficult to bring them together to a comprehensive tabula rasa system compatible with current knowledge of how verbal information is processed in the brain. This work presents a cognitive system, entirely based on a large-scale neural architecture, which was developed to shed light on the procedural knowledge involved in language elaboration. The main component of this system is the central executive, which is a supervising system that coordinates the other components of the working memory. In our model, the central executive is a neural network that takes as input the neural activation states of the short-term memory and yields as output mental actions, which control the flow of information among the working memory components through neural gating mechanisms. The proposed system is capable of learning to communicate through natural language starting from tabula rasa, without any a priori knowledge of the structure of phrases, meaning of words, role of the different classes of words, only by interacting with a human through a text-based interface, using an open-ended incremental learning process. It is able to learn nouns, verbs, adjectives, pronouns and other word classes, and to use them in expressive language. The model was validated on a corpus of 1587 input sentences, based on literature on early language assessment, at the level of about 4-years old child, and produced 521 output sentences, expressing a broad range of language processing functionalities.

An intelligent tutoring system that generates a natural language dialogue using dynamic multi-level planning.

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Woo, Chong Woo; Evens, Martha W; Freedman, Reva; Glass, Michael; Shim, Leem Seop; Zhang, Yuemei; Zhou, Yujian; Michael, Joel

2006-09-01

The objective of this research was to build an intelligent tutoring system capable of carrying on a natural language dialogue with a student who is solving a problem in physiology. Previous experiments have shown that students need practice in qualitative causal reasoning to internalize new knowledge and to apply it effectively and that they learn by putting their ideas into words. Analysis of a corpus of 75 hour-long tutoring sessions carried on in keyboard-to-keyboard style by two professors of physiology at Rush Medical College tutoring first-year medical students provided the rules used in tutoring strategies and tactics, parsing, and text generation. The system presents the student with a perturbation to the blood pressure, asks for qualitative predictions of the changes produced in seven important cardiovascular variables, and then launches a dialogue to correct any errors and to probe for possible misconceptions. The natural language understanding component uses a cascade of finite-state machines. The generation is based on lexical functional grammar. Results of experiments with pretests and posttests have shown that using the system for an hour produces significant learning gains and also that even this brief use improves the student's ability to solve problems more then reading textual material on the topic. Student surveys tell us that students like the system and feel that they learn from it. The system is now in regular use in the first-year physiology course at Rush Medical College. We conclude that the CIRCSIM-Tutor system demonstrates that intelligent tutoring systems can implement effective natural language dialogue with current language technology.

Toward a molecular programming language for algorithmic self-assembly

Science.gov (United States)

Patitz, Matthew John

Self-assembly is the process whereby relatively simple components autonomously combine to form more complex objects. Nature exhibits self-assembly to form everything from microscopic crystals to living cells to galaxies. With a desire to both form increasingly sophisticated products and to understand the basic components of living systems, scientists have developed and studied artificial self-assembling systems. One such framework is the Tile Assembly Model introduced by Erik Winfree in 1998. In this model, simple two-dimensional square 'tiles' are designed so that they self-assemble into desired shapes. The work in this thesis consists of a series of results which build toward the future goal of designing an abstracted, high-level programming language for designing the molecular components of self-assembling systems which can perform powerful computations and form into intricate structures. The first two sets of results demonstrate self-assembling systems which perform infinite series of computations that characterize computably enumerable and decidable languages, and exhibit tools for algorithmically generating the necessary sets of tiles. In the next chapter, methods for generating tile sets which self-assemble into complicated shapes, namely a class of discrete self-similar fractal structures, are presented. Next, a software package for graphically designing tile sets, simulating their self-assembly, and debugging designed systems is discussed. Finally, a high-level programming language which abstracts much of the complexity and tedium of designing such systems, while preventing many of the common errors, is presented. The summation of this body of work presents a broad coverage of the spectrum of desired outputs from artificial self-assembling systems and a progression in the sophistication of tools used to design them. By creating a broader and deeper set of modular tools for designing self-assembling systems, we hope to increase the complexity which is

Recent Technological Advances in Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence

OpenAIRE

Shah, Nishal Pradeepkumar

2012-01-01

A recent advance in computer technology has permitted scientists to implement and test algorithms that were known from quite some time (or not) but which were computationally expensive. Two such projects are IBM's Jeopardy as a part of its DeepQA project [1] and Wolfram's Wolframalpha[2]. Both these methods implement natural language processing (another goal of AI scientists) and try to answer questions as asked by the user. Though the goal of the two projects is similar, both of them have a ...

Quantum Algorithms for Compositional Natural Language Processing

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

William Zeng

2016-08-01

Full Text Available We propose a new application of quantum computing to the field of natural language processing. Ongoing work in this field attempts to incorporate grammatical structure into algorithms that compute meaning. In (Coecke, Sadrzadeh and Clark, 2010, the authors introduce such a model (the CSC model based on tensor product composition. While this algorithm has many advantages, its implementation is hampered by the large classical computational resources that it requires. In this work we show how computational shortcomings of the CSC approach could be resolved using quantum computation (possibly in addition to existing techniques for dimension reduction. We address the value of quantum RAM (Giovannetti,2008 for this model and extend an algorithm from Wiebe, Braun and Lloyd (2012 into a quantum algorithm to categorize sentences in CSC. Our new algorithm demonstrates a quadratic speedup over classical methods under certain conditions.

Integrating Multi-Purpose Natural Language Understanding, Robot's Memory, and Symbolic Planning for Task Execution in Humanoid Robots

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Wächter, Mirko; Ovchinnikova, Ekaterina; Wittenbeck, Valerij

2017-01-01

We propose an approach for instructing a robot using natural language to solve complex tasks in a dynamic environment. In this study, we elaborate on a framework that allows a humanoid robot to understand natural language, derive symbolic representations of its sensorimotor experience, generate....... The framework is implemented within the robot development environment ArmarX. We evaluate the framework on the humanoid robot ARMAR-III in the context of two experiments: a demonstration of the real execution of a complex task in the kitchen environment on ARMAR-III and an experiment with untrained users...

Morphing into Adolescents: Active Word Learning for English-Language Learners and Their Classmates in Middle School

Science.gov (United States)

Kieffer, Michael J.; Lesaux, Nonie K.

2010-01-01

Many students arrive at middle school without the academic language skills they need to read sophisticated texts with comprehension. In particular, English language learners and students from low-income backgrounds attending underresourced, urban middle schools lack opportunities to learn the thousands of academic words they need to succeed. To…

Cognitive Neuroscience of Natural Language Use

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Willems, R.M.

2015-01-01

When we think of everyday language use, the first things that come to mind include colloquial conversations, reading and writing e-mails, sending text messages or reading a book. But can we study the brain basis of language as we use it in our daily lives? As a topic of study, the cognitive

SoS Notebook: An Interactive Multi-Language Data Analysis Environment.

Science.gov (United States)

Peng, Bo; Wang, Gao; Ma, Jun; Leong, Man Chong; Wakefield, Chris; Melott, James; Chiu, Yulun; Du, Di; Weinstein, John N

2018-05-22

Complex bioinformatic data analysis workflows involving multiple scripts in different languages can be difficult to consolidate, share, and reproduce. An environment that streamlines the entire processes of data collection, analysis, visualization and reporting of such multi-language analyses is currently lacking. We developed Script of Scripts (SoS) Notebook, a web-based notebook environment that allows the use of multiple scripting language in a single notebook, with data flowing freely within and across languages. SoS Notebook enables researchers to perform sophisticated bioinformatic analysis using the most suitable tools for different parts of the workflow, without the limitations of a particular language or complications of cross-language communications. SoS Notebook is hosted at http://vatlab.github.io/SoS/ and is distributed under a BSD license. bpeng@mdanderson.org.

Language Revitalization.

Science.gov (United States)

Hinton, Leanne

2003-01-01

Surveys developments in language revitalization and language death. Focusing on indigenous languages, discusses the role and nature of appropriate linguistic documentation, possibilities for bilingual education, and methods of promoting oral fluency and intergenerational transmission in affected languages. (Author/VWL)

Laboratory process control using natural language commands from a personal computer

Science.gov (United States)

Will, Herbert A.; Mackin, Michael A.

1989-01-01

PC software is described which provides flexible natural language process control capability with an IBM PC or compatible machine. Hardware requirements include the PC, and suitable hardware interfaces to all controlled devices. Software required includes the Microsoft Disk Operating System (MS-DOS) operating system, a PC-based FORTRAN-77 compiler, and user-written device drivers. Instructions for use of the software are given as well as a description of an application of the system.

Suicide Note Classification Using Natural Language Processing: A Content Analysis

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

John Pestian

2010-08-01

Full Text Available Suicide is the second leading cause of death among 25–34 year olds and the third leading cause of death among 15–25 year olds in the United States. In the Emergency Department, where suicidal patients often present, estimating the risk of repeated attempts is generally left to clinical judgment. This paper presents our second attempt to determine the role of computational algorithms in understanding a suicidal patient’s thoughts, as represented by suicide notes. We focus on developing methods of natural language processing that distinguish between genuine and elicited suicide notes. We hypothesize that machine learning algorithms can categorize suicide notes as well as mental health professionals and psychiatric physician trainees do. The data used are comprised of suicide notes from 33 suicide completers and matched to 33 elicited notes from healthy control group members. Eleven mental health professionals and 31 psychiatric trainees were asked to decide if a note was genuine or elicited. Their decisions were compared to nine different machine-learning algorithms. The results indicate that trainees accurately classified notes 49% of the time, mental health professionals accurately classified notes 63% of the time, and the best machine learning algorithm accurately classified the notes 78% of the time. This is an important step in developing an evidence-based predictor of repeated suicide attempts because it shows that natural language processing can aid in distinguishing between classes of suicidal notes.

Steering the conversation: A linguistic exploration of natural language interactions with a digital assistant during simulated driving.

Science.gov (United States)

Large, David R; Clark, Leigh; Quandt, Annie; Burnett, Gary; Skrypchuk, Lee

2017-09-01

Given the proliferation of 'intelligent' and 'socially-aware' digital assistants embodying everyday mobile technology - and the undeniable logic that utilising voice-activated controls and interfaces in cars reduces the visual and manual distraction of interacting with in-vehicle devices - it appears inevitable that next generation vehicles will be embodied by digital assistants and utilise spoken language as a method of interaction. From a design perspective, defining the language and interaction style that a digital driving assistant should adopt is contingent on the role that they play within the social fabric and context in which they are situated. We therefore conducted a qualitative, Wizard-of-Oz study to explore how drivers might interact linguistically with a natural language digital driving assistant. Twenty-five participants drove for 10 min in a medium-fidelity driving simulator while interacting with a state-of-the-art, high-functioning, conversational digital driving assistant. All exchanges were transcribed and analysed using recognised linguistic techniques, such as discourse and conversation analysis, normally reserved for interpersonal investigation. Language usage patterns demonstrate that interactions with the digital assistant were fundamentally social in nature, with participants affording the assistant equal social status and high-level cognitive processing capability. For example, participants were polite, actively controlled turn-taking during the conversation, and used back-channelling, fillers and hesitation, as they might in human communication. Furthermore, participants expected the digital assistant to understand and process complex requests mitigated with hedging words and expressions, and peppered with vague language and deictic references requiring shared contextual information and mutual understanding. Findings are presented in six themes which emerged during the analysis - formulating responses; turn-taking; back

Deviations in the Zipf and Heaps laws in natural languages

Science.gov (United States)

Bochkarev, Vladimir V.; Lerner, Eduard Yu; Shevlyakova, Anna V.

2014-03-01

This paper is devoted to verifying of the empirical Zipf and Hips laws in natural languages using Google Books Ngram corpus data. The connection between the Zipf and Heaps law which predicts the power dependence of the vocabulary size on the text size is discussed. In fact, the Heaps exponent in this dependence varies with the increasing of the text corpus. To explain it, the obtained results are compared with the probability model of text generation. Quasi-periodic variations with characteristic time periods of 60-100 years were also found.

Semi-supervised learning and domain adaptation in natural language processing

CERN Document Server

Søgaard, Anders

2013-01-01

This book introduces basic supervised learning algorithms applicable to natural language processing (NLP) and shows how the performance of these algorithms can often be improved by exploiting the marginal distribution of large amounts of unlabeled data. One reason for that is data sparsity, i.e., the limited amounts of data we have available in NLP. However, in most real-world NLP applications our labeled data is also heavily biased. This book introduces extensions of supervised learning algorithms to cope with data sparsity and different kinds of sampling bias.This book is intended to be both

Deviations in the Zipf and Heaps laws in natural languages

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Bochkarev, Vladimir V; Lerner, Eduard Yu; Shevlyakova, Anna V

2014-01-01

This paper is devoted to verifying of the empirical Zipf and Hips laws in natural languages using Google Books Ngram corpus data. The connection between the Zipf and Heaps law which predicts the power dependence of the vocabulary size on the text size is discussed. In fact, the Heaps exponent in this dependence varies with the increasing of the text corpus. To explain it, the obtained results are compared with the probability model of text generation. Quasi-periodic variations with characteristic time periods of 60-100 years were also found

Language Models With Meta-information

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Shi, Y.

2014-01-01

Language modeling plays a critical role in natural language processing and understanding. Starting from a general structure, language models are able to learn natural language patterns from rich input data. However, the state-of-the-art language models only take advantage of words themselves, which

Automated Trait Extraction using ClearEarth, a Natural Language Processing System for Text Mining in Natural Sciences

OpenAIRE

Thessen,Anne; Preciado,Jenette; Jain,Payoj; Martin,James; Palmer,Martha; Bhat,Riyaz

2018-01-01

The cTAKES package (using the ClearTK Natural Language Processing toolkit Bethard et al. 2014, http://cleartk.github.io/cleartk/) has been successfully used to automatically read clinical notes in the medical field (Albright et al. 2013, Styler et al. 2014). It is used on a daily basis to automatically process clinical notes and extract relevant information by dozens of medical institutions. ClearEarth is a collaborative project that brings together computational linguistics and domain scient...

AutoTutor and Family: A Review of 17 Years of Natural Language Tutoring

Science.gov (United States)

Nye, Benjamin D.; Graesser, Arthur C.; Hu, Xiangen

2014-01-01

AutoTutor is a natural language tutoring system that has produced learning gains across multiple domains (e.g., computer literacy, physics, critical thinking). In this paper, we review the development, key research findings, and systems that have evolved from AutoTutor. First, the rationale for developing AutoTutor is outlined and the advantages…

Construct Validity in TOEFL iBT Speaking Tasks: Insights from Natural Language Processing

Science.gov (United States)

Kyle, Kristopher; Crossley, Scott A.; McNamara, Danielle S.

2016-01-01

This study explores the construct validity of speaking tasks included in the TOEFL iBT (e.g., integrated and independent speaking tasks). Specifically, advanced natural language processing (NLP) tools, MANOVA difference statistics, and discriminant function analyses (DFA) are used to assess the degree to which and in what ways responses to these…

Introduction to the special issue: parsimony and redundancy in models of language.

Science.gov (United States)

Wiechmann, Daniel; Kerz, Elma; Snider, Neal; Jaeger, T Florian

2013-09-01

One of the most fundamental goals in linguistic theory is to understand the nature of linguistic knowledge, that is, the representations and mechanisms that figure in a cognitively plausible model of human language-processing. The past 50 years have witnessed the development and refinement of various theories about what kind of 'stuff' human knowledge of language consists of, and technological advances now permit the development of increasingly sophisticated computational models implementing key assumptions of different theories from both rationalist and empiricist perspectives. The present special issue does not aim to present or discuss the arguments for and against the two epistemological stances or discuss evidence that supports either of them (cf. Bod, Hay, & Jannedy, 2003; Christiansen & Chater, 2008; Hauser, Chomsky, & Fitch, 2002; Oaksford & Chater, 2007; O'Donnell, Hauser, & Fitch, 2005). Rather, the research presented in this issue, which we label usage-based here, conceives of linguistic knowledge as being induced from experience. According to the strongest of such accounts, the acquisition and processing of language can be explained with reference to general cognitive mechanisms alone (rather than with reference to innate language-specific mechanisms). Defined in these terms, usage-based approaches encompass approaches referred to as experience-based, performance-based and/or emergentist approaches (Amrnon & Snider, 2010; Bannard, Lieven, & Tomasello, 2009; Bannard & Matthews, 2008; Chater & Manning, 2006; Clark & Lappin, 2010; Gerken, Wilson, & Lewis, 2005; Gomez, 2002;

Cognitive ability rivals the effect of political sophistication on ideological voting

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Hebbelstrup Rye Rasmussen, Stig

2016-01-01

This article examines the impact of cognitive ability on ideological voting. We find, using a US sample and a Danish sample, that the effect of cognitive ability rivals the effect of the traditionally strongest predicter of ideological voting political sophistication. Furthermore, the results...... are consistent with the effect of cognitive ability being partly mediated by political sophistication. Much of the effect of cognitive ability remains however and is not explained by differences in education or Openness to experience either. The implications of these results for democratic theory are discussed....

Language evolution and human-computer interaction

Science.gov (United States)

Grudin, Jonathan; Norman, Donald A.

1991-01-01

Many of the issues that confront designers of interactive computer systems also appear in natural language evolution. Natural languages and human-computer interfaces share as their primary mission the support of extended 'dialogues' between responsive entities. Because in each case one participant is a human being, some of the pressures operating on natural languages, causing them to evolve in order to better support such dialogue, also operate on human-computer 'languages' or interfaces. This does not necessarily push interfaces in the direction of natural language - since one entity in this dialogue is not a human, this is not to be expected. Nonetheless, by discerning where the pressures that guide natural language evolution also appear in human-computer interaction, we can contribute to the design of computer systems and obtain a new perspective on natural languages.

Children with Specific Language Impairment and Their Families: A Future View of Nature Plus Nurture and New Technologies for Comprehensive Language Intervention Strategies.

Science.gov (United States)

Rice, Mabel L

2016-11-01

Future perspectives on children with language impairments are framed from what is known about children with specific language impairment (SLI). A summary of the current state of services is followed by discussion of how these children can be overlooked and misunderstood and consideration of why it is so hard for some children to acquire language when it is effortless for most children. Genetic influences are highlighted, with the suggestion that nature plus nurture should be considered in present as well as future intervention approaches. A nurture perspective highlights the family context of the likelihood of SLI for some of the children. Future models of the causal pathways may provide more specific information to guide gene-treatment decisions, in ways parallel to current personalized medicine approaches. Future treatment options can build on the potential of electronic technologies and social media to provide personalized treatment methods available at a time and place convenient for the person to use as often as desired. The speech-language pathologist could oversee a wide range of treatment options and monitor evidence provided electronically to evaluate progress and plan future treatment steps. Most importantly, future methods can provide lifelong language acquisition activities that maintain the privacy and dignity of persons with language impairment, and in so doing will in turn enhance the effectiveness of speech-language pathologists. Thieme Medical Publishers 333 Seventh Avenue, New York, NY 10001, USA.

Natural language acquisition in large scale neural semantic networks

Science.gov (United States)

Ealey, Douglas

This thesis puts forward the view that a purely signal- based approach to natural language processing is both plausible and desirable. By questioning the veracity of symbolic representations of meaning, it argues for a unified, non-symbolic model of knowledge representation that is both biologically plausible and, potentially, highly efficient. Processes to generate a grounded, neural form of this model-dubbed the semantic filter-are discussed. The combined effects of local neural organisation, coincident with perceptual maturation, are used to hypothesise its nature. This theoretical model is then validated in light of a number of fundamental neurological constraints and milestones. The mechanisms of semantic and episodic development that the model predicts are then used to explain linguistic properties, such as propositions and verbs, syntax and scripting. To mimic the growth of locally densely connected structures upon an unbounded neural substrate, a system is developed that can grow arbitrarily large, data- dependant structures composed of individual self- organising neural networks. The maturational nature of the data used results in a structure in which the perception of concepts is refined by the networks, but demarcated by subsequent structure. As a consequence, the overall structure shows significant memory and computational benefits, as predicted by the cognitive and neural models. Furthermore, the localised nature of the neural architecture also avoids the increasing error sensitivity and redundancy of traditional systems as the training domain grows. The semantic and episodic filters have been demonstrated to perform as well, or better, than more specialist networks, whilst using significantly larger vocabularies, more complex sentence forms and more natural corpora.

Drawing Dynamic Geometry Figures Online with Natural Language for Junior High School Geometry

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Wong, Wing-Kwong; Yin, Sheng-Kai; Yang, Chang-Zhe

2012-01-01

This paper presents a tool for drawing dynamic geometric figures by understanding the texts of geometry problems. With the tool, teachers and students can construct dynamic geometric figures on a web page by inputting a geometry problem in natural language. First we need to build the knowledge base for understanding geometry problems. With the…

PERSISTENCE AND ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE IN NATURAL SCIENCES STUDENTS

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Alexandr I Krupnov

2017-12-01

Full Text Available The article discusses the results of empirical study of the association between variables of persistence and academic achievement in foreign languages. The sample includes students of the Faculty of Physics, Mathematics and Natural Science at the RUDN University ( n = 115, divided into 5 subsamples, two of which are featured in the present study (the most and the least successful students subsamples. Persistence as a personality trait is studied within A.I. Krupnov’s system-functional approach. A.I. Krupnov’s paper-and-pencil test was used to measure persistence variables. Academic achievement was measured according to the four parameters: Phonetics, Grammar, Speaking and Political vocabulary based on the grades students received during the academic year. The analysis revealed that persistence displays different associations with academic achievement variables in more and less successful students subsamples, the general prominence of this trait is more important for unsuccessful students. Phonetics is the academic achievement variable most associated with persistence due to its nature, a skill one can acquire through hard work and practice which is the definition of persistence. Grammar as an academic achievement variable is not associated with persistence and probably relates to other factors. Unsuccessful students may have difficulties in separating various aspects of language acquisition from each other which should be taken into consideration by the teachers.

Testing an AAC system that transforms pictograms into natural language with persons with cerebral palsy.

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Pahisa-Solé, Joan; Herrera-Joancomartí, Jordi

2017-10-18

In this article, we describe a compansion system that transforms the telegraphic language that comes from the use of pictogram-based augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) into natural language. The system was tested with four participants with severe cerebral palsy and ranging degrees of linguistic competence and intellectual disabilities. Participants had used pictogram-based AAC at least for the past 30 years each and presented a stable linguistic profile. During tests, which consisted of a total of 40 sessions, participants were able to learn new linguistic skills, such as the use of basic verb tenses, while using the compansion system, which proved a source of motivation. The system can be adapted to the linguistic competence of each person and required no learning curve during tests when none of its special features, like gender, number, verb tense, or sentence type modifiers, were used. Furthermore, qualitative and quantitative results showed a mean communication rate increase of 41.59%, compared to the same communication device without the compansion system, and an overall improvement in the communication experience when the output is in natural language. Tests were conducted in Catalan and Spanish.

Constructing Concept Schemes From Astronomical Telegrams Via Natural Language Clustering

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Graham, Matthew; Zhang, M.; Djorgovski, S. G.; Donalek, C.; Drake, A. J.; Mahabal, A.

2012-01-01

The rapidly emerging field of time domain astronomy is one of the most exciting and vibrant new research frontiers, ranging in scientific scope from studies of the Solar System to extreme relativistic astrophysics and cosmology. It is being enabled by a new generation of large synoptic digital sky surveys - LSST, PanStarrs, CRTS - that cover large areas of sky repeatedly, looking for transient objects and phenomena. One of the biggest challenges facing these is the automated classification of transient events, a process that needs machine-processible astronomical knowledge. Semantic technologies enable the formal representation of concepts and relations within a particular domain. ATELs (http://www.astronomerstelegram.org) are a commonly-used means for reporting and commenting upon new astronomical observations of transient sources (supernovae, stellar outbursts, blazar flares, etc). However, they are loose and unstructured and employ scientific natural language for description: this makes automated processing of them - a necessity within the next decade with petascale data rates - a challenge. Nevertheless they represent a potentially rich corpus of information that could lead to new and valuable insights into transient phenomena. This project lies in the cutting-edge field of astrosemantics, a branch of astroinformatics, which applies semantic technologies to astronomy. The ATELs have been used to develop an appropriate concept scheme - a representation of the information they contain - for transient astronomy using hierarchical clustering of processed natural language. This allows us to automatically organize ATELs based on the vocabulary used. We conclude that we can use simple algorithms to process and extract meaning from astronomical textual data.

Dynamical Languages

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Xie, Huimin

The following sections are included: * Definition of Dynamical Languages * Distinct Excluded Blocks * Definition and Properties * L and L″ in Chomsky Hierarchy * A Natural Equivalence Relation * Symbolic Flows * Symbolic Flows and Dynamical Languages * Subshifts of Finite Type * Sofic Systems * Graphs and Dynamical Languages * Graphs and Shannon-Graphs * Transitive Languages * Topological Entropy

Using Skype in the Second and Foreign Language Classroom

Science.gov (United States)

Eaton, Sarah Elaine

2010-01-01

This presentation introduced Skype and how it can be used to: (1) connect teachers with other professionals - and save on long distance charges - even internationally (2) empower language teachers and tutors (3) give presentations and workshops (4) be a stepping stone to using more sophisticated technology in the classroom. It was noted that for…

Training Parents to Use the Natural Language Paradigm to Increase Their Autistic Children's Speech.

Science.gov (United States)

Laski, Karen E.; And Others

1988-01-01

Parents of four nonverbal and four echolalic autistic children, aged five-nine, were trained to increase their children's speech by using the Natural Language Paradigm. Following training, parents increased the frequency with which they required their children to speak, and children increased the frequency of their verbalizations in three…

Coupling ontology driven semantic representation with multilingual natural language generation for tuning international terminologies.

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Rassinoux, Anne-Marie; Baud, Robert H; Rodrigues, Jean-Marie; Lovis, Christian; Geissbühler, Antoine

2007-01-01

The importance of clinical communication between providers, consumers and others, as well as the requisite for computer interoperability, strengthens the need for sharing common accepted terminologies. Under the directives of the World Health Organization (WHO), an approach is currently being conducted in Australia to adopt a standardized terminology for medical procedures that is intended to become an international reference. In order to achieve such a standard, a collaborative approach is adopted, in line with the successful experiment conducted for the development of the new French coding system CCAM. Different coding centres are involved in setting up a semantic representation of each term using a formal ontological structure expressed through a logic-based representation language. From this language-independent representation, multilingual natural language generation (NLG) is performed to produce noun phrases in various languages that are further compared for consistency with the original terms. Outcomes are presented for the assessment of the International Classification of Health Interventions (ICHI) and its translation into Portuguese. The initial results clearly emphasize the feasibility and cost-effectiveness of the proposed method for handling both a different classification and an additional language. NLG tools, based on ontology driven semantic representation, facilitate the discovery of ambiguous and inconsistent terms, and, as such, should be promoted for establishing coherent international terminologies.

The Relationship between Logistics Sophistication and Drivers of the Outsourcing of Logistics Activities

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Peter Wanke

2008-10-01

Full Text Available A strong link has been established between operational excellence and the degree of sophistication of logistics organization, a function of factors such as performance monitoring, investment in Information Technology [IT] and the formalization of logistics organization, as proposed in the Bowersox, Daugherty, Dröge, Germain and Rogers (1992 Leading Edge model. At the same time, shippers have been increasingly outsourcing their logistics activities to third party providers. This paper, based on a survey with large Brazilian shippers, addresses a gap in the literature by investigating the relationship between dimensions of logistics organization sophistication and drivers of logistics outsourcing. To this end, the dimensions behind the logistics sophistication construct were first investigated. Results from factor analysis led to the identification of six dimensions of logistics sophistication. By means of multivariate logistical regression analyses it was possible to relate some of these dimensions, such as the formalization of the logistics organization, to certain drivers of the outsourcing of logistics activities of Brazilian shippers, such as cost savings. These results indicate the possibility of segmenting shippers according to characteristics of their logistics organization, which may be particularly useful to logistics service providers.

Lexical Complexity Development from Dynamic Systems Theory Perspective: Lexical Density, Diversity, and Sophistication

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Reza Kalantari

2017-10-01

Full Text Available This longitudinal case study explored Iranian EFL learners’ lexical complexity (LC through the lenses of Dynamic Systems Theory (DST. Fifty independent essays written by five intermediate to advanced female EFL learners in a TOEFL iBT preparation course over six months constituted the corpus of this study. Three Coh-Metrix indices (Graesser, McNamara, Louwerse, & Cai, 2004; McNamara & Graesser, 2012, three Lexical Complexity Analyzer indices (Lu, 2010, 2012; Lu & Ai, 2011, and four Vocabprofile indices (Cobb, 2000 were selected to measure different dimensions of LC. Results of repeated measures analysis of variance (RM ANOVA indicated an improvement with regard to only lexical sophistication. Positive and significant relationships were found between time and mean values in Academic Word List and Beyond-2000 as indicators of lexical sophistication. The remaining seven indices of LC, falling short of significance, tended to flatten over the course of this writing program. Correlation analyses among LC indices indicated that lexical density enjoyed positive correlations with lexical sophistication. However, lexical diversity revealed no significant correlations with both lexical density and lexical sophistication. This study suggests that DST perspective specifies a viable foundation for analyzing lexical complexity

Text to Speech Berbasis Natural Language pada Aplikasi Pembelajaran Tenses Bahasa Inggris

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Amak Yunus

2014-09-01

Full Text Available Bahasa adalah sebuah cara berkomunikasi secara sistematis dengan menggunakan suara atau simbol-simbol yang memiliki arti, yang diucapkan melalui mulut. Bahasa juga ditulis dengan mengikuti kaidah yang berlaku. Salah satu bahasa yang banyak digunakan di belahan dunia adalah Bahasa Inggris. Namun ada beberapa kendala apabila kita belajar kepada seorang guru atau instruktur. Waktu yang diberikan seorang guru, terbatas pada jam sekolah atau les saja. Bila siswa pulang sekolah atau les, maka yang bersangkutan harus belajar bahasa Inggris secara mandiri. Dari permasalahan di atas, muncul sebuah ide tentang bagaimana membuat sebuah penelitian yang berkaitan dengan pembuatan aplikasi yang mampu memberikan pengetahuan kepada siswa tentang bagaimana belajar bahasa Inggris secara mandiri baik dari perubahan kalimat postif menjadi kalimat negatif dan kalimat tanya. Disamping itu, aplikasi ini juga mampu memberikan pengetahuan tentang bagaimana mengucapkan kalimat dalam bahasa Inggris. Pada intinya kontribusi yang dapat diperoleh dari hasil penelitian ini adalah pihak terkait dari tingkat SMP sampai dengan SMU/SMK, dapat menggunakan aplikasi text to speech berbasis natural language processing untuk mempelajari tenses pada bahasa Inggris. Aplikasi ini dapat memperdengarkan kalimat-kalimat pada bahasa inggris dan dapat menyusun kalimat tanya dan kalimat negatif berdasarkan kalimat positifnya dalam beberapa tenses bahasa Inggris. Kata Kunci : Natural language processing, Text to speech

ONTOLOGY BASED MEANINGFUL SEARCH USING SEMANTIC WEB AND NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING TECHNIQUES

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K. Palaniammal

2013-10-01

Full Text Available The semantic web extends the current World Wide Web by adding facilities for the machine understood description of meaning. The ontology based search model is used to enhance efficiency and accuracy of information retrieval. Ontology is the core technology for the semantic web and this mechanism for representing formal and shared domain descriptions. In this paper, we proposed ontology based meaningful search using semantic web and Natural Language Processing (NLP techniques in the educational domain. First we build the educational ontology then we present the semantic search system. The search model consisting three parts which are embedding spell-check, finding synonyms using WordNet API and querying ontology using SPARQL language. The results are both sensitive to spell check and synonymous context. This paper provides more accurate results and the complete details for the selected field in a single page.

Using Opinions and Knowledge to Identify Natural Groups of Gambling Employees.

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Gray, Heather M; Tom, Matthew A; LaPlante, Debi A; Shaffer, Howard J

2015-12-01

Gaming industry employees are at higher risk than the general population for health conditions including gambling disorder. Responsible gambling training programs, which train employees about gambling and gambling-related problems, might be a point of intervention. However, such programs tend to use a "one-size-fits-all" approach rather than multiple tiers of instruction. We surveyed employees of one Las Vegas casino (n = 217) and one online gambling operator (n = 178) regarding their gambling-related knowledge and opinions prior to responsible gambling training, to examine the presence of natural knowledge groups among recently hired employees. Using k-means cluster analysis, we observed four natural groups within the Las Vegas casino sample and two natural groups within the online operator sample. We describe these natural groups in terms of opinion/knowledge differences as well as distributions of demographic/occupational characteristics. Gender and language spoken at home were correlates of cluster group membership among the sample of Las Vegas casino employees, but we did not identify demographic or occupational correlates of cluster group membership among the online gambling operator employees. Gambling operators should develop more sophisticated training programs that include instruction that targets different natural knowledge groups.

Bibliography of Research in Natural Language Generation

Science.gov (United States)

1993-11-01

593], pages International Conference of the IEEE Engineer- 351-363. ing in Medicine and Biology Society, volume 3, pages 1347-1348, New Orleans, LA...Conference on Machine Translation of Languages and Applied [1218] Ingrid Zukerman. Koalas are not bears: Gener- Language Analysis. pages 66-80. Her

Constructed Action, the Clause and the Nature of Syntax in Finnish Sign Language

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Jantunen Tommi

2017-01-01

Full Text Available This paper investigates the interplay of constructed action and the clause in Finnish Sign Language (FinSL. Constructed action is a form of gestural enactment in which the signers use their hands, face and other parts of the body to represent the actions, thoughts or feelings of someone they are referring to in the discourse. With the help of frequencies calculated from corpus data, this article shows firstly that when FinSL signers are narrating a story, there are differences in how they use constructed action. Then the paper argues that there are differences also in the prototypical structure, linkage type and non-manual activity of clauses, depending on the presence or non-presence of constructed action. Finally, taking the view that gesturality is an integral part of language, the paper discusses the nature of syntax in sign languages and proposes a conceptualization in which syntax is seen as a set of norms distributed on a continuum between a categorial-conventional end and a gradient-unconventional end.

Language and Interactional Discourse: Deconstrusting the Talk- Generating Machinery in Natural Convresation

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Amaechi Uneke Enyi

2015-08-01

Full Text Available The study entitled. “Language and Interactional Discourse: Deconstructing the Talk - Generating Machinery in Natural Conversation,” is an analysis of spontaneous and informal conversation. The study, carried out in the theoretical and methodological tradition of Ethnomethodology, was aimed at explicating how ordinary talk is organized and produced, how people coordinate their talk –in- interaction, how meanings are determined, and the role of talk in the wider social processes. The study followed the basic assumption of conversation analysis which is, that talk is not just a product of two ‘speakers - hearers’ who attempt to exchange information or convey messages to each other. Rather, participants in conversation are seen to be mutually orienting to, and collaborating in order to achieve orderly and meaningful communication. The analytic objective is therefore to make clear these procedures on which speakers rely to produce utterances and by which they make sense of other speakers’ talk. The datum used for this study was a recorded informal conversation between two (and later three middle- class civil servants who are friends. The recording was done in such a way that the participants were not aware that they were being recorded. The recording was later transcribed in a way that we believe is faithful to the spontaneity and informality of the talk. Our finding showed that conversation has its own features and is an ordered and structured social day by- day event. Specifically, utterances are designed and informed by organized procedures, methods and resources which are tied to the contexts in which they are produced, and which participants are privy to by virtue of their membership of a culture or a natural language community.  Keywords: Language, Discourse and Conversation

A Requirements-Based Exploration of Open-Source Software Development Projects--Towards a Natural Language Processing Software Analysis Framework

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Vlas, Radu Eduard

2012-01-01

Open source projects do have requirements; they are, however, mostly informal, text descriptions found in requests, forums, and other correspondence. Understanding such requirements provides insight into the nature of open source projects. Unfortunately, manual analysis of natural language requirements is time-consuming, and for large projects,…

On the Possibility of ESP Data Use in Natural Language Processing

OpenAIRE

Knopp, Tomáš

2011-01-01

The aim of this bachelor thesis is to explore this image label database coming from the ESP game from the natural language processing (NLP) point of view. ESP game is an online game, in which human players do useful work - they label images. The output of the ESP game is then a database of images and their labels. What interests us is whether the data collected in the process of labeling images will be of any use in NLP tasks. Specifically, we are interested in the tasks of automatic corefere...

Development of a user-friendly interface for the searching of a data base in natural language while using concepts and means of artificial intelligence

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Pujo, Pascal

1989-01-01

This research thesis aimed at the development of a natural-language-based user-friendly interface for the searching of relational data bases. The author first addresses how to store data which will be accessible through an interface in natural language: this organisation must result in as few constraints as possible in query formulation. He briefly presents techniques related to the automatic processing of natural language, and highlights the need for a more user-friendly interface. Then, he presents the developed interface and outlines the user-friendliness and ergonomics of implemented procedures. He shows how the interface has been designed to deliver information and explanations on its processing. This allows the user to control the relevance of the answer. He also indicates the classification of mistakes and errors which may be present in queries in natural language. He finally gives an overview of possible evolutions of the interface, briefly presents deductive functionalities which could expand data management. The handling of complex objects is also addressed [fr

Ulisse Aldrovandi's Color Sensibility: Natural History, Language and the Lay Color Practices of Renaissance Virtuosi.

Science.gov (United States)

Pugliano, Valentina

2015-01-01

Famed for his collection of drawings of naturalia and his thoughts on the relationship between painting and natural knowledge, it now appears that the Bolognese naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522-1605) also pondered specifically color and pigments, compiling not only lists and diagrams of color terms but also a full-length unpublished manuscript entitled De coloribus or Trattato dei colori. Introducing these writings for the first time, this article portrays a scholar not so much interested in the materiality of pigment production, as in the cultural history of hues. It argues that these writings constituted an effort to build a language of color, in the sense both of a standard nomenclature of hues and of a lexicon, a dictionary of their denotations and connotations as documented in the literature of ancients and moderns. This language would serve the naturalist in his artistic patronage and his natural historical studies, where color was considered one of the most reliable signs for the correct identification of specimens, and a guarantee of accuracy in their illustration. Far from being an exception, Aldrovandi's 'color sensibility'spoke of that of his university-educated nature-loving peers.

Conversation principles and second language utterances

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Kaburise, Phyllis

2007-12-01

Full Text Available Conversation principles, such as those of Grice (1957, 1968, 1975, Austin (1962, Searle (1962, 1969 are formulated to enable interlocutors to interact meaningfully, in a linguistic project. Non-observance and flouting of these principles occur regularly in the verbal behaviours of users of a language, indeed, sophisticated users of a language, sometimes deliberately go against these norms, as stylistic devices in their output. When such non-conformities occur, hearers and readers resort to implicatures, maxims, inferences and their general world knowledge to interpret an utterance. Although the decision to observe some, and not all of the principles during a linguistic encounter, may seem to be taken casually, it is the contention of this paper that such decisions are made deliberately, particularly, by users of a second language. This paper attempts to identify the selection processes involved in the creation of some utterances produced by Ghanaian and Tshivenda second language users of English, using Grice’s verbal interaction maxims. The discussion will focus on the tension between semantic and pragmatic meaning, the factors involved in the creation of linguistic meaning and the role that interaction requirements such as Grice’s conversational maxims and the concept of a New Englishes approach to language play in the creation of some second language utterances.

A natural language screening measure for motivation to change.

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Miller, William R; Johnson, Wendy R

2008-09-01

Client motivation for change, a topic of high interest to addiction clinicians, is multidimensional and complex, and many different approaches to measurement have been tried. The current effort drew on psycholinguistic research on natural language that is used by clients to describe their own motivation. Seven addiction treatment sites participated in the development of a simple scale to measure client motivation. Twelve items were drafted to represent six potential dimensions of motivation for change that occur in natural discourse. The maximum self-rating of motivation (10 on a 0-10 scale) was the median score on all items, and 43% of respondents rated 10 on all 12 items - a substantial ceiling effect. From 1035 responses, three factors emerged representing importance, ability, and commitment - constructs that are also reflected in several theoretical models of motivation. A 3-item version of the scale, with one marker item for each of these constructs, accounted for 81% of variance in the full scale. The three items are: 1. It is important for me to . . . 2. I could . . . and 3. I am trying to . . . This offers a quick (1-minute) assessment of clients' self-reported motivation for change.

The New Toxicology of Sophisticated Materials: Nanotoxicology and Beyond

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Maynard, Andrew D.; Warheit, David B.; Philbert, Martin A.

2011-01-01

It has long been recognized that the physical form of materials can mediate their toxicity—the health impacts of asbestiform materials, industrial aerosols, and ambient particulate matter are prime examples. Yet over the past 20 years, toxicology research has suggested complex and previously unrecognized associations between material physicochemistry at the nanoscale and biological interactions. With the rapid rise of the field of nanotechnology and the design and production of increasingly complex nanoscale materials, it has become ever more important to understand how the physical form and chemical composition of these materials interact synergistically to determine toxicity. As a result, a new field of research has emerged—nanotoxicology. Research within this field is highlighting the importance of material physicochemical properties in how dose is understood, how materials are characterized in a manner that enables quantitative data interpretation and comparison, and how materials move within, interact with, and are transformed by biological systems. Yet many of the substances that are the focus of current nanotoxicology studies are relatively simple materials that are at the vanguard of a new era of complex materials. Over the next 50 years, there will be a need to understand the toxicology of increasingly sophisticated materials that exhibit novel, dynamic and multifaceted functionality. If the toxicology community is to meet the challenge of ensuring the safe use of this new generation of substances, it will need to move beyond “nano” toxicology and toward a new toxicology of sophisticated materials. Here, we present a brief overview of the current state of the science on the toxicology of nanoscale materials and focus on three emerging toxicology-based challenges presented by sophisticated materials that will become increasingly important over the next 50 years: identifying relevant materials for study, physicochemical characterization, and

Modelling language

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Cardey, Sylviane

2013-01-01

In response to the need for reliable results from natural language processing, this book presents an original way of decomposing a language(s) in a microscopic manner by means of intra/inter‑language norms and divergences, going progressively from languages as systems to the linguistic, mathematical and computational models, which being based on a constructive approach are inherently traceable. Languages are described with their elements aggregating or repelling each other to form viable interrelated micro‑systems. The abstract model, which contrary to the current state of the art works in int

Procles the Carthaginian: A North African Sophist in Pausanias’ Periegesis

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Juan Pablo Sánchez Hernández

2010-11-01

Full Text Available Procles, cited by Pausanias (in the imperfect tense about a display in Rome and for an opinion about Pyrrhus of Epirus, probably was not a historian of Hellenistic date, but a contemporary sophist whom Pausanias encountered in person in Rome.

Crowdsourcing a normative natural language dataset: a comparison of Amazon Mechanical Turk and in-lab data collection.

Science.gov (United States)

Saunders, Daniel R; Bex, Peter J; Woods, Russell L

2013-05-20

Crowdsourcing has become a valuable method for collecting medical research data. This approach, recruiting through open calls on the Web, is particularly useful for assembling large normative datasets. However, it is not known how natural language datasets collected over the Web differ from those collected under controlled laboratory conditions. To compare the natural language responses obtained from a crowdsourced sample of participants with responses collected in a conventional laboratory setting from participants recruited according to specific age and gender criteria. We collected natural language descriptions of 200 half-minute movie clips, from Amazon Mechanical Turk workers (crowdsourced) and 60 participants recruited from the community (lab-sourced). Crowdsourced participants responded to as many clips as they wanted and typed their responses, whereas lab-sourced participants gave spoken responses to 40 clips, and their responses were transcribed. The content of the responses was evaluated using a take-one-out procedure, which compared responses to other responses to the same clip and to other clips, with a comparison of the average number of shared words. In contrast to the 13 months of recruiting that was required to collect normative data from 60 lab-sourced participants (with specific demographic characteristics), only 34 days were needed to collect normative data from 99 crowdsourced participants (contributing a median of 22 responses). The majority of crowdsourced workers were female, and the median age was 35 years, lower than the lab-sourced median of 62 years but similar to the median age of the US population. The responses contributed by the crowdsourced participants were longer on average, that is, 33 words compared to 28 words (Pcrowdsourced participants had more shared words (P=.004 and .01 respectively), whereas younger participants had higher numbers of shared words in the lab-sourced population (P=.01). Crowdsourcing is an effective approach

Preface to Proceedings of the 12th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation (ENLG 2009)

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Krahmer, E.; Krahmer, E.; Theune, Mariet

We are pleased to present the Proceedings of the 12th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation (ENLG 2009). ENLG 2009 was held in Athens, Greece, as a workshop at the 12th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2009). Following our call, we

Natural Language Processing Approach for Searching the Quran: Quick and Intuitive

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Zainal Abidah

2017-01-01

Full Text Available The Quran is a scripture that acts as the main reference to people which their religion is Islam. It covers information from politics to science, with vast amount of information that requires effort to uncover the knowledge behind it. Today, the emergence of smartphones has led to the development of a wide-range application for enhancing knowledge-seeking activities. This project proposes a mobile application that is taking a natural language approach to searching topics in the Quran based on keyword searching. The benefit of the application is two-fold; it is intuitive and it saves time.

Causal knowledge extraction by natural language processing in material science: a case study in chemical vapor deposition

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Yuya Kajikawa

2006-11-01

Full Text Available Scientific publications written in natural language still play a central role as our knowledge source. However, due to the flood of publications, the literature survey process has become a highly time-consuming and tangled process, especially for novices of the discipline. Therefore, tools supporting the literature-survey process may help the individual scientist to explore new useful domains. Natural language processing (NLP is expected as one of the promising techniques to retrieve, abstract, and extract knowledge. In this contribution, NLP is firstly applied to the literature of chemical vapor deposition (CVD, which is a sub-discipline of materials science and is a complex and interdisciplinary field of research involving chemists, physicists, engineers, and materials scientists. Causal knowledge extraction from the literature is demonstrated using NLP.

Early Home Activities and Oral Language Skills in Middle Childhood: A Quantile Analysis

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Law, James; Rush, Robert; King, Tom; Westrupp, Elizabeth; Reilly, Sheena

2018-01-01

Oral language development is a key outcome of elementary school, and it is important to identify factors that predict it most effectively. Commonly researchers use ordinary least squares regression with conclusions restricted to average performance conditional on relevant covariates. Quantile regression offers a more sophisticated alternative.…

BIBLIOGRAPHY ON LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT.

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Harvard Univ., Cambridge, MA. Graduate School of Education.

THIS BIBLIOGRAPHY LISTS MATERIAL ON VARIOUS ASPECTS OF LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT. APPROXIMATELY 65 UNANNOTATED REFERENCES ARE PROVIDED TO DOCUMENTS DATING FROM 1958 TO 1966. JOURNALS, BOOKS, AND REPORT MATERIALS ARE LISTED. SUBJECT AREAS INCLUDED ARE THE NATURE OF LANGUAGE, LINGUISTICS, LANGUAGE LEARNING, LANGUAGE SKILLS, LANGUAGE PATTERNS, AND…

Does underground storage still require sophisticated studies?

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Marsily, G. de

1997-01-01

Most countries agree to the necessity of burying high or medium-level wastes in geological layers situated at a few hundred meters below the ground level. The advantages and disadvantages of different types of rock such as salt, clay, granite and volcanic material are examined. Sophisticated studies are lead to determine the best geological confinement but questions arise about the time for which safety must be ensured. France has chosen 3 possible sites. These sites are geologically described in the article. The final place will be proposed after a testing phase of about 5 years in an underground facility. (A.C.)

Natural Language Description of Emotion

Science.gov (United States)

Kazemzadeh, Abe

2013-01-01

This dissertation studies how people describe emotions with language and how computers can simulate this descriptive behavior. Although many non-human animals can express their current emotions as social signals, only humans can communicate about emotions symbolically. This symbolic communication of emotion allows us to talk about emotions that we…

Policy-Based Management Natural Language Parser

Science.gov (United States)

James, Mark

2009-01-01

The Policy-Based Management Natural Language Parser (PBEM) is a rules-based approach to enterprise management that can be used to automate certain management tasks. This parser simplifies the management of a given endeavor by establishing policies to deal with situations that are likely to occur. Policies are operating rules that can be referred to as a means of maintaining order, security, consistency, or other ways of successfully furthering a goal or mission. PBEM provides a way of managing configuration of network elements, applications, and processes via a set of high-level rules or business policies rather than managing individual elements, thus switching the control to a higher level. This software allows unique management rules (or commands) to be specified and applied to a cross-section of the Global Information Grid (GIG). This software embodies a parser that is capable of recognizing and understanding conversational English. Because all possible dialect variants cannot be anticipated, a unique capability was developed that parses passed on conversation intent rather than the exact way the words are used. This software can increase productivity by enabling a user to converse with the system in conversational English to define network policies. PBEM can be used in both manned and unmanned science-gathering programs. Because policy statements can be domain-independent, this software can be applied equally to a wide variety of applications.

STAF: A Powerful and Sophisticated CAI System.

Science.gov (United States)

Loach, Ken

1982-01-01

Describes the STAF (Science Teacher's Authoring Facility) computer-assisted instruction system developed at Leeds University (England), focusing on STAF language and major program features. Although programs for the system emphasize physical chemistry and organic spectroscopy, the system and language are general purpose and can be used in any…

Systemic functional grammar in natural language generation linguistic description and computational representation

CERN Document Server

Teich, Elke

1999-01-01

This volume deals with the computational application of systemic functional grammar (SFG) for natural language generation. In particular, it describes the implementation of a fragment of the grammar of German in the computational framework of KOMET-PENMAN for multilingual generation. The text also presents a specification of explicit well-formedness constraints on syntagmatic structure which are defined in the form of typed feature structures. It thus achieves a model of systemic functional grammar that unites both the strengths of systemics, such as stratification, functional diversification

Natural language solution to a Tuff problem

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Langkopf, B.S.; Mallory, L.H.

1984-01-01

A scientific data base, the Tuff Data Base, is being created at Sandia National Laboratories on the Cyber 170/855, using System 2000. It is being developed for use by scientists and engineers investigating the feasibility of locating a high-level radioactive waste repository in tuff (a type of volcanic rock) at Yucca Mountain on and adjacent to the Nevada Test Site. This project, the Nevada Nuclear Waste Storage Investigations (NNWSI) Project, is managed by the Nevada Operations Office of the US Department of Energy. A user-friendly interface, PRIMER, was developed that uses the Self-Contained Facility (SCF) command SUBMIT and System 2000 Natural Language functions and parametric strings that are schema resident. The interface was designed to: (1) allow users, with or without computer experience or keyboard skill, to sporadically access data in the Tuff Data Base; (2) produce retrieval capabilities for the user quickly; and (3) acquaint the users with the data in the Tuff Data Base. This paper gives a brief description of the Tuff Data Base Schema and the interface, PRIMER, which is written in Fortran V. 3 figures

"Speaking English Naturally": The Language Ideologies of English as an Official Language at a Korean University

Science.gov (United States)

Choi, Jinsook

2016-01-01

This study explores language ideologies of English at a Korean university where English has been adopted as an official language. This study draws on ethnographic data in order to understand how speakers respond to and experience the institutional language policy. The findings show that language ideologies in this university represent the…

Automatic generation of natural language nursing shift summaries in neonatal intensive care: BT-Nurse.

Science.gov (United States)

Hunter, James; Freer, Yvonne; Gatt, Albert; Reiter, Ehud; Sripada, Somayajulu; Sykes, Cindy

2012-11-01

Our objective was to determine whether and how a computer system could automatically generate helpful natural language nursing shift summaries solely from an electronic patient record system, in a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). A system was developed which automatically generates partial NICU shift summaries (for the respiratory and cardiovascular systems), using data-to-text technology. It was evaluated for 2 months in the NICU at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, under supervision. In an on-ward evaluation, a substantial majority of the summaries was found by outgoing and incoming nurses to be understandable (90%), and a majority was found to be accurate (70%), and helpful (59%). The evaluation also served to identify some outstanding issues, especially with regard to extra content the nurses wanted to see in the computer-generated summaries. It is technically possible automatically to generate limited natural language NICU shift summaries from an electronic patient record. However, it proved difficult to handle electronic data that was intended primarily for display to the medical staff, and considerable engineering effort would be required to create a deployable system from our proof-of-concept software. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Computational Nonlinear Morphology with Emphasis on Semitic Languages. Studies in Natural Language Processing.

Science.gov (United States)

Kiraz, George Anton

This book presents a tractable computational model that can cope with complex morphological operations, especially in Semitic languages, and less complex morphological systems present in Western languages. It outlines a new generalized regular rewrite rule system that uses multiple finite-state automata to cater to root-and-pattern morphology,…

Optimizing annotation resources for natural language de-identification via a game theoretic framework.

Science.gov (United States)

Li, Muqun; Carrell, David; Aberdeen, John; Hirschman, Lynette; Kirby, Jacqueline; Li, Bo; Vorobeychik, Yevgeniy; Malin, Bradley A

2016-06-01

Electronic medical records (EMRs) are increasingly repurposed for activities beyond clinical care, such as to support translational research and public policy analysis. To mitigate privacy risks, healthcare organizations (HCOs) aim to remove potentially identifying patient information. A substantial quantity of EMR data is in natural language form and there are concerns that automated tools for detecting identifiers are imperfect and leak information that can be exploited by ill-intentioned data recipients. Thus, HCOs have been encouraged to invest as much effort as possible to find and detect potential identifiers, but such a strategy assumes the recipients are sufficiently incentivized and capable of exploiting leaked identifiers. In practice, such an assumption may not hold true and HCOs may overinvest in de-identification technology. The goal of this study is to design a natural language de-identification framework, rooted in game theory, which enables an HCO to optimize their investments given the expected capabilities of an adversarial recipient. We introduce a Stackelberg game to balance risk and utility in natural language de-identification. This game represents a cost-benefit model that enables an HCO with a fixed budget to minimize their investment in the de-identification process. We evaluate this model by assessing the overall payoff to the HCO and the adversary using 2100 clinical notes from Vanderbilt University Medical Center. We simulate several policy alternatives using a range of parameters, including the cost of training a de-identification model and the loss in data utility due to the removal of terms that are not identifiers. In addition, we compare policy options where, when an attacker is fined for misuse, a monetary penalty is paid to the publishing HCO as opposed to a third party (e.g., a federal regulator). Our results show that when an HCO is forced to exhaust a limited budget (set to $2000 in the study), the precision and recall of the

Linguistics in Language Education

Science.gov (United States)

Kumar, Rajesh; Yunus, Reva

2014-01-01

This article looks at the contribution of insights from theoretical linguistics to an understanding of language acquisition and the nature of language in terms of their potential benefit to language education. We examine the ideas of innateness and universal language faculty, as well as multilingualism and the language-society relationship. Modern…

Natural Language Generation from Pictographs

OpenAIRE

Sevens, Leen; Vandeghinste, Vincent; Schuurman, Ineke; Van Eynde, Frank

2015-01-01

We present a Pictograph-to-Text translation system for people with Intellectual or Developmental Disabilities (IDD). The system translates pictograph messages, consisting of one or more pictographs, into Dutch text using WordNet links and an n-gram language model. We also provide several pictograph input methods assisting the users in selecting the appropriate pictographs.

The oscillopathic nature of language deficits in autism: from genes to language evolution

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Antonio eBenítez-Burraco

2016-03-01

Full Text Available Autism spectrum disorders (ASD are pervasive neurodevelopmental disorders involving a number of deficits to linguistic cognition. The gap between genetics and the pathophysiology of ASD remains open, in particular regarding its distinctive linguistic profile. The goal of this paper is to attempt to bridge this gap, focusing on how the autistic brain processes language, particularly through the perspective of brain rhythms. Due to the phenomenon of pleiotropy, which may take some decades to overcome, we believe that studies of brain rhythms, which are not faced with problems of this scale, may constitute a more tractable route to interpreting language deficits in ASD and eventually other neurocognitive disorders. Building on recent attempts to link neural oscillations to certain computational primitives of language, we show that interpreting language deficits in ASD as oscillopathic traits is a potentially fruitful way to construct successful endophenotypes of this condition. Additionally, we will show that candidate genes for ASD are overrepresented among the genes that played a role in the evolution of language. These genes include (and are related to genes involved in brain rhythmicity. We hope that the type of steps taken here will additionally lead to a better understanding of the comorbidity, heterogeneity, and variability of ASD, and may help achieve a better treatment of the affected populations.

Gesture language use in natural UI: pen-based sketching in conceptual design

Science.gov (United States)

Ma, Cuixia; Dai, Guozhong

2003-04-01

Natural User Interface is one of the important next generation interactions. Computers are not just the tools of many special people or areas but for most people. Ubiquitous computing makes the world magic and more comfortable. In the design domain, current systems, which need the detail information, cannot conveniently support the conceptual design of the early phrase. Pen and paper are the natural and simple tools to use in our daily life, especially in design domain. Gestures are the useful and natural mode in the interaction of pen-based. In natural UI, gestures can be introduced and used through the similar mode to the existing resources in interaction. But the gestures always are defined beforehand without the users' intention and recognized to represent something in certain applications without being transplanted to others. We provide the gesture description language (GDL) to try to cite the useful gestures to the applications conveniently. It can be used in terms of the independent control resource such as menus or icons in applications. So we give the idea from two perspectives: one from the application-dependent point of view and the other from the application-independent point of view.

Behind the scenes: A medical natural language processing project.

Science.gov (United States)

Wu, Joy T; Dernoncourt, Franck; Gehrmann, Sebastian; Tyler, Patrick D; Moseley, Edward T; Carlson, Eric T; Grant, David W; Li, Yeran; Welt, Jonathan; Celi, Leo Anthony

2018-04-01

Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities in medicine can help address many pressing problems in healthcare. However, AI research endeavors in healthcare may not be clinically relevant, may have unrealistic expectations, or may not be explicit enough about their limitations. A diverse and well-functioning multidisciplinary team (MDT) can help identify appropriate and achievable AI research agendas in healthcare, and advance medical AI technologies by developing AI algorithms as well as addressing the shortage of appropriately labeled datasets for machine learning. In this paper, our team of engineers, clinicians and machine learning experts share their experience and lessons learned from their two-year-long collaboration on a natural language processing (NLP) research project. We highlight specific challenges encountered in cross-disciplinary teamwork, dataset creation for NLP research, and expectation setting for current medical AI technologies. Copyright © 2017. Published by Elsevier B.V.

Resolution of ambiguities in cartoons as an illustration of the role of pragmatics in natural language understanding by computers

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Mazlack, L.J.; Paz, N.M.

1983-01-01

Newspaper cartoons can graphically display the result of ambiguity in human speech; the result can be unexpected and funny. Likewise, computer analysis of natural language statements also needs to successfully resolve ambiguous situations. Computer techniques already developed use restricted world knowledge in resolving ambiguous language use. This paper illustrates how these techniques can be used in resolving ambiguous situations arising in cartoons. 8 references.

Computers and languages theory and practice

CERN Document Server

Nijholt, A

1988-01-01

A global introduction to language technology and the areas of computer science where language technology plays a role. Surveyed in this volume are issues related to the parsing problem in the fields of natural languages, programming languages, and formal languages.Throughout the book attention is paid to the social forces which influenced the development of the various topics. Also illustrated are the development of the theory of language analysis, its role in compiler construction, and its role in computer applications with a natural language interface between men and machine. Parts of the ma

Sociolinguistic Typology and Sign Languages.

Science.gov (United States)

Schembri, Adam; Fenlon, Jordan; Cormier, Kearsy; Johnston, Trevor

2018-01-01

This paper examines the possible relationship between proposed social determinants of morphological 'complexity' and how this contributes to linguistic diversity, specifically via the typological nature of the sign languages of deaf communities. We sketch how the notion of morphological complexity, as defined by Trudgill (2011), applies to sign languages. Using these criteria, sign languages appear to be languages with low to moderate levels of morphological complexity. This may partly reflect the influence of key social characteristics of communities on the typological nature of languages. Although many deaf communities are relatively small and may involve dense social networks (both social characteristics that Trudgill claimed may lend themselves to morphological 'complexification'), the picture is complicated by the highly variable nature of the sign language acquisition for most deaf people, and the ongoing contact between native signers, hearing non-native signers, and those deaf individuals who only acquire sign languages in later childhood and early adulthood. These are all factors that may work against the emergence of morphological complexification. The relationship between linguistic typology and these key social factors may lead to a better understanding of the nature of sign language grammar. This perspective stands in contrast to other work where sign languages are sometimes presented as having complex morphology despite being young languages (e.g., Aronoff et al., 2005); in some descriptions, the social determinants of morphological complexity have not received much attention, nor has the notion of complexity itself been specifically explored.

Sociolinguistic Typology and Sign Languages

Science.gov (United States)

Schembri, Adam; Fenlon, Jordan; Cormier, Kearsy; Johnston, Trevor

2018-01-01

This paper examines the possible relationship between proposed social determinants of morphological ‘complexity’ and how this contributes to linguistic diversity, specifically via the typological nature of the sign languages of deaf communities. We sketch how the notion of morphological complexity, as defined by Trudgill (2011), applies to sign languages. Using these criteria, sign languages appear to be languages with low to moderate levels of morphological complexity. This may partly reflect the influence of key social characteristics of communities on the typological nature of languages. Although many deaf communities are relatively small and may involve dense social networks (both social characteristics that Trudgill claimed may lend themselves to morphological ‘complexification’), the picture is complicated by the highly variable nature of the sign language acquisition for most deaf people, and the ongoing contact between native signers, hearing non-native signers, and those deaf individuals who only acquire sign languages in later childhood and early adulthood. These are all factors that may work against the emergence of morphological complexification. The relationship between linguistic typology and these key social factors may lead to a better understanding of the nature of sign language grammar. This perspective stands in contrast to other work where sign languages are sometimes presented as having complex morphology despite being young languages (e.g., Aronoff et al., 2005); in some descriptions, the social determinants of morphological complexity have not received much attention, nor has the notion of complexity itself been specifically explored. PMID:29515506

Sociolinguistic Typology and Sign Languages

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Adam Schembri

2018-02-01

Full Text Available This paper examines the possible relationship between proposed social determinants of morphological ‘complexity’ and how this contributes to linguistic diversity, specifically via the typological nature of the sign languages of deaf communities. We sketch how the notion of morphological complexity, as defined by Trudgill (2011, applies to sign languages. Using these criteria, sign languages appear to be languages with low to moderate levels of morphological complexity. This may partly reflect the influence of key social characteristics of communities on the typological nature of languages. Although many deaf communities are relatively small and may involve dense social networks (both social characteristics that Trudgill claimed may lend themselves to morphological ‘complexification’, the picture is complicated by the highly variable nature of the sign language acquisition for most deaf people, and the ongoing contact between native signers, hearing non-native signers, and those deaf individuals who only acquire sign languages in later childhood and early adulthood. These are all factors that may work against the emergence of morphological complexification. The relationship between linguistic typology and these key social factors may lead to a better understanding of the nature of sign language grammar. This perspective stands in contrast to other work where sign languages are sometimes presented as having complex morphology despite being young languages (e.g., Aronoff et al., 2005; in some descriptions, the social determinants of morphological complexity have not received much attention, nor has the notion of complexity itself been specifically explored.

Human Computer Collaboration at the Edge: Enhancing Collective Situation Understanding with Controlled Natural Language

Science.gov (United States)

2016-09-06

conversational agent with information exchange disabled until the end of the experiment run. The meaning of the indicator in the top- right of the agent... Human Computer Collaboration at the Edge: Enhancing Collective Situation Understanding with Controlled Natural Language Alun Preece∗, William...email: PreeceAD@cardiff.ac.uk †Emerging Technology Services, IBM United Kingdom Ltd, Hursley Park, Winchester, UK ‡US Army Research Laboratory, Human

Finding the Fabulous Few: Why Your Program Needs Sophisticated Research.

Science.gov (United States)

Pfizenmaier, Emily

1981-01-01

Fund raising, it is argued, needs sophisticated prospect research. Professional prospect researchers play an important role in helping to identify prospective donors and also in helping to stimulate interest in gift giving. A sample of an individual work-up on a donor and a bibliography are provided. (MLW)

LABORATORY PROCESS CONTROLLER USING NATURAL LANGUAGE COMMANDS FROM A PERSONAL COMPUTER

Science.gov (United States)

Will, H.

1994-01-01

The complex environment of the typical research laboratory requires flexible process control. This program provides natural language process control from an IBM PC or compatible machine. Sometimes process control schedules require changes frequently, even several times per day. These changes may include adding, deleting, and rearranging steps in a process. This program sets up a process control system that can either run without an operator, or be run by workers with limited programming skills. The software system includes three programs. Two of the programs, written in FORTRAN77, record data and control research processes. The third program, written in Pascal, generates the FORTRAN subroutines used by the other two programs to identify the user commands with the user-written device drivers. The software system also includes an input data set which allows the user to define the user commands which are to be executed by the computer. To set the system up the operator writes device driver routines for all of the controlled devices. Once set up, this system requires only an input file containing natural language command lines which tell the system what to do and when to do it. The operator can make up custom commands for operating and taking data from external research equipment at any time of the day or night without the operator in attendance. This process control system requires a personal computer operating under MS-DOS with suitable hardware interfaces to all controlled devices. The program requires a FORTRAN77 compiler and user-written device drivers. This program was developed in 1989 and has a memory requirement of about 62 Kbytes.

Reading wild minds: A computational assay of Theory of Mind sophistication across seven primate species.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Marie Devaine

2017-11-01

Full Text Available Theory of Mind (ToM, i.e. the ability to understand others' mental states, endows humans with highly adaptive social skills such as teaching or deceiving. Candidate evolutionary explanations have been proposed for the unique sophistication of human ToM among primates. For example, the Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis states that the increasing complexity of social networks may have induced a demand for sophisticated ToM. This type of scenario ignores neurocognitive constraints that may eventually be crucial limiting factors for ToM evolution. In contradistinction, the cognitive scaffolding hypothesis asserts that a species' opportunity to develop sophisticated ToM is mostly determined by its general cognitive capacity (on which ToM is scaffolded. However, the actual relationships between ToM sophistication and either brain volume (a proxy for general cognitive capacity or social group size (a proxy for social network complexity are unclear. Here, we let 39 individuals sampled from seven non-human primate species (lemurs, macaques, mangabeys, orangutans, gorillas and chimpanzees engage in simple dyadic games against artificial ToM players (via a familiar human caregiver. Using computational analyses of primates' choice sequences, we found that the probability of exhibiting a ToM-compatible learning style is mainly driven by species' brain volume (rather than by social group size. Moreover, primates' social cognitive sophistication culminates in a precursor form of ToM, which still falls short of human fully-developed ToM abilities.

Creation of structured documentation templates using Natural Language Processing techniques.

Science.gov (United States)

Kashyap, Vipul; Turchin, Alexander; Morin, Laura; Chang, Frank; Li, Qi; Hongsermeier, Tonya

2006-01-01

Structured Clinical Documentation is a fundamental component of the healthcare enterprise, linking both clinical (e.g., electronic health record, clinical decision support) and administrative functions (e.g., evaluation and management coding, billing). One of the challenges in creating good quality documentation templates has been the inability to address specialized clinical disciplines and adapt to local clinical practices. A one-size-fits-all approach leads to poor adoption and inefficiencies in the documentation process. On the other hand, the cost associated with manual generation of documentation templates is significant. Consequently there is a need for at least partial automation of the template generation process. We propose an approach and methodology for the creation of structured documentation templates for diabetes using Natural Language Processing (NLP).

Building gold standard corpora for medical natural language processing tasks.

Science.gov (United States)

Deleger, Louise; Li, Qi; Lingren, Todd; Kaiser, Megan; Molnar, Katalin; Stoutenborough, Laura; Kouril, Michal; Marsolo, Keith; Solti, Imre

2012-01-01

We present the construction of three annotated corpora to serve as gold standards for medical natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Clinical notes from the medical record, clinical trial announcements, and FDA drug labels are annotated. We report high inter-annotator agreements (overall F-measures between 0.8467 and 0.9176) for the annotation of Personal Health Information (PHI) elements for a de-identification task and of medications, diseases/disorders, and signs/symptoms for information extraction (IE) task. The annotated corpora of clinical trials and FDA labels will be publicly released and to facilitate translational NLP tasks that require cross-corpora interoperability (e.g. clinical trial eligibility screening) their annotation schemas are aligned with a large scale, NIH-funded clinical text annotation project.

Dependency distance: A new perspective on the syntactic development in second language acquisition. Comment on "Dependency distance: A new perspective on syntactic patterns in natural language" by Haitao Liu et al.

Science.gov (United States)

Jiang, Jingyang; Ouyang, Jinghui

2017-07-01

Liu et al. [1] offers a clear and informative account of the use of dependency distance in studying natural languages, with a focus on the viewpoint that dependency distance minimization (DDM) can be regarded as a linguistic universal. We would like to add the perspective of employing dependency distance in the studies of second languages acquisition (SLA), particularly the studies of syntactic development.

Few remarks on chiral theories with sophisticated topology

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Golo, V.L.; Perelomov, A.M.

1978-01-01

Two classes of the two-dimensional Euclidean chiral field theoreties are singled out: 1) the field phi(x) takes the values in the compact Hermitiam symmetric space 2) the field phi(x) takes the values in an orbit of the adjoint representation of the comcompact Lie group. The theories have sophisticated topological and rich analytical structures. They are considered with the help of topological invariants (topological charges). Explicit formulae for the topological charges are indicated, and the lower bound extimate for the action is given

New Ways to Learn a Foreign Language.

Science.gov (United States)

Hall, Robert A., Jr.

This text focuses on the nature of language learning in the light of modern linguistic analysis. Common linguistic problems encountered by students of eight major languages are examined--Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German, and Russian. The text discusses the nature of language, building new language habits, overcoming…

Development of a user friendly interface for database querying in natural language by using concepts and means related to artificial intelligence

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Pujo, Pascal

1989-01-01

This research thesis reports the development of a user-friendly interface in natural language for querying a relational database. The developed system differs from usual approaches for its integrated architecture as the relational model management is totally controlled by the interface. The author first addresses the way to store data in order to make them accessible through an interface in natural language, and more precisely to store data with an organisation which would result in the less possible constraints in query formulation. The author then briefly presents techniques related to automatic processing in natural language, and discusses the implications of a better user-friendliness and for error processing. The next part reports the study of the developed interface: selection of data processing tools, interface development, data management at the interface level, information input by the user. The last chapter proposes an overview of possible evolutions for the interface: use of deductive functionalities, use of an extensional base and of an intentional base to deduce facts from knowledge stores in the extensional base, and handling of complex objects [fr

Teaching and Learning Sign Language as a “Foreign” Language ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

In recent years, there has been a growing debate in the United States, Europe, and Australia about the nature of the Deaf community as a cultural community,1 and the recognition of signed languages as “real” or “legitimate” languages comparable in all meaningful ways to spoken languages. An important element of this ...

Language of the Earth: Exploring Natural Hazards through a Literary Anthology

Science.gov (United States)

Malamud, B. D.; Rhodes, F. H. T.

2009-04-01

This paper explores natural hazards teaching and communications through the use of a literary anthology of writings about the earth aimed at non-experts. Teaching natural hazards in high-school and university introductory Earth Science and Geography courses revolves mostly around lectures, examinations, and laboratory demonstrations/activities. Often the results of such a course are that a student 'memorizes' the answers, and is penalized when they miss a given fact [e.g., "You lost one point because you were off by 50 km/hr on the wind speed of an F5 tornado."] Although facts and general methodologies are certainly important when teaching natural hazards, it is a strong motivation to a student's assimilation of, and enthusiasm for, this knowledge, if supplemented by writings about the Earth. In this paper, we discuss a literary anthology which we developed [Language of the Earth, Rhodes, Stone, Malamud, Wiley-Blackwell, 2008] which includes many descriptions about natural hazards. Using first- and second-hand accounts of landslides, earthquakes, tsunamis, floods and volcanic eruptions, through the writings of McPhee, Gaskill, Voltaire, Austin, Cloos, and many others, hazards become 'alive', and more than 'just' a compilation of facts and processes. Using short excerpts such as these, or other similar anthologies, of remarkably written accounts and discussions about natural hazards results in 'dry' facts becoming more than just facts. These often highly personal viewpoints of our catostrophic world, provide a useful supplement to a student's understanding of the turbulent world in which we live.

STOCK EXCHANGE LISTING INDUCES SOPHISTICATION OF CAPITAL BUDGETING

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Wesley Mendes-da-Silva

2014-08-01

Full Text Available This article compares capital budgeting techniques employed in listed and unlisted companies in Brazil. We surveyed the Chief Financial Officers (CFOs of 398 listed companies and 300 large unlisted companies, and based on 91 respondents, the results suggest that the CFOs of listed companies tend to use less simplistic methods more often, for example: NPV and CAPM, and that CFOs of unlisted companies are less likely to estimate the cost of equity, despite being large companies. These findings indicate that stock exchange listing may require greater sophistication of the capital budgeting process.

A Natural Language Intelligent Tutoring System for Training Pathologists - Implementation and Evaluation

Science.gov (United States)

El Saadawi, Gilan M.; Tseytlin, Eugene; Legowski, Elizabeth; Jukic, Drazen; Castine, Melissa; Fine, Jeffrey; Gormley, Robert; Crowley, Rebecca S.

2009-01-01

Introduction We developed and evaluated a Natural Language Interface (NLI) for an Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) in Diagnostic Pathology. The system teaches residents to examine pathologic slides and write accurate pathology reports while providing immediate feedback on errors they make in their slide review and diagnostic reports. Residents can ask for help at any point in the case, and will receive context-specific feedback. Research Questions We evaluated (1) the performance of our natural language system, (2) the effect of the system on learning (3) the effect of feedback timing on learning gains and (4) the effect of ReportTutor on performance to self-assessment correlations. Methods The study uses a crossover 2×2 factorial design. We recruited 20 subjects from 4 academic programs. Subjects were randomly assigned to one of the four conditions - two conditions for the immediate interface, and two for the delayed interface. An expert dermatopathologist created a reference standard and 2 board certified AP/CP pathology fellows manually coded the residents' assessment reports. Subjects were given the opportunity to self grade their performance and we used a survey to determine student response to both interfaces. Results Our results show a highly significant improvement in report writing after one tutoring session with 4-fold increase in the learning gains with both interfaces but no effect of feedback timing on performance gains. Residents who used the immediate feedback interface first experienced a feature learning gain that is correlated with the number of cases they viewed. There was no correlation between performance and self-assessment in either condition. PMID:17934789

Natural language processing systems for capturing and standardizing unstructured clinical information: A systematic review.

Science.gov (United States)

Kreimeyer, Kory; Foster, Matthew; Pandey, Abhishek; Arya, Nina; Halford, Gwendolyn; Jones, Sandra F; Forshee, Richard; Walderhaug, Mark; Botsis, Taxiarchis

2017-09-01

We followed a systematic approach based on the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses to identify existing clinical natural language processing (NLP) systems that generate structured information from unstructured free text. Seven literature databases were searched with a query combining the concepts of natural language processing and structured data capture. Two reviewers screened all records for relevance during two screening phases, and information about clinical NLP systems was collected from the final set of papers. A total of 7149 records (after removing duplicates) were retrieved and screened, and 86 were determined to fit the review criteria. These papers contained information about 71 different clinical NLP systems, which were then analyzed. The NLP systems address a wide variety of important clinical and research tasks. Certain tasks are well addressed by the existing systems, while others remain as open challenges that only a small number of systems attempt, such as extraction of temporal information or normalization of concepts to standard terminologies. This review has identified many NLP systems capable of processing clinical free text and generating structured output, and the information collected and evaluated here will be important for prioritizing development of new approaches for clinical NLP. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

A Discussion about Upgrading the Quick Script Platform to Create Natural Language based IoT Systems

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Khanna, Anirudh; Das, Bhagwan; Pandey, Bishwajeet

2016-01-01

With the advent of AI and IoT, the idea of incorporating smart things/appliances in our day to day life is converting into a reality. The paper discusses the possibilities and potential of designing IoT systems which can be controlled via natural language, with help of Quick Script as a development...

AIED 2009 Workshops Proceeedings Volume 10: Natural Language Processing in Support of Learning: Metrics, Feedback and Connectivity

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Dessus, Philippe; Trausan-Matu, Stefan; Van Rosmalen, Peter; Wild, Fridolin

2009-01-01

Dessus, P., Trausan-Matu, S., Van Rosmalen, P., & Wild, F. (Eds.) (2009). AIED 2009 Workshops Proceedings Volume 10 Natural Language Processing in Support of Learning: Metrics, Feedback and Connectivity. In S. D. Craig & D. Dicheva (Eds.), AIED 2009: 14th International Conference in Artificial

Pattern Recognition and Natural Language Processing: State of the Art

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Mirjana Kocaleva

2016-05-01

Full Text Available Development of information technologies is growing steadily. With the latest software technologies development and application of the methods of artificial intelligence and machine learning intelligence embededs in computers, the expectations are that in near future computers will be able to solve problems themselves like people do. Artificial intelligence emulates human behavior on computers. Rather than executing instructions one by one, as theyare programmed, machine learning employs prior experience/data that is used in the process of system’s training. In this state of the art paper, common methods in AI, such as machine learning, pattern recognition and the natural language processing (NLP are discussed. Also are given standard architecture of NLP processing system and the level thatisneeded for understanding NLP. Lastly the statistical NLP processing and multi-word expressions are described.

First Language Acquisition and Teaching

Science.gov (United States)

Cruz-Ferreira, Madalena

2011-01-01

"First language acquisition" commonly means the acquisition of a single language in childhood, regardless of the number of languages in a child's natural environment. Language acquisition is variously viewed as predetermined, wondrous, a source of concern, and as developing through formal processes. "First language teaching" concerns schooling in…

Context Analysis of Customer Requests using a Hybrid Adaptive Neuro Fuzzy Inference System and Hidden Markov Models in the Natural Language Call Routing Problem

Science.gov (United States)

Rustamov, Samir; Mustafayev, Elshan; Clements, Mark A.

2018-04-01

The context analysis of customer requests in a natural language call routing problem is investigated in the paper. One of the most significant problems in natural language call routing is a comprehension of client request. With the aim of finding a solution to this issue, the Hybrid HMM and ANFIS models become a subject to an examination. Combining different types of models (ANFIS and HMM) can prevent misunderstanding by the system for identification of user intention in dialogue system. Based on these models, the hybrid system may be employed in various language and call routing domains due to nonusage of lexical or syntactic analysis in classification process.

Context Analysis of Customer Requests using a Hybrid Adaptive Neuro Fuzzy Inference System and Hidden Markov Models in the Natural Language Call Routing Problem

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Rustamov Samir

2018-04-01

Full Text Available The context analysis of customer requests in a natural language call routing problem is investigated in the paper. One of the most significant problems in natural language call routing is a comprehension of client request. With the aim of finding a solution to this issue, the Hybrid HMM and ANFIS models become a subject to an examination. Combining different types of models (ANFIS and HMM can prevent misunderstanding by the system for identification of user intention in dialogue system. Based on these models, the hybrid system may be employed in various language and call routing domains due to nonusage of lexical or syntactic analysis in classification process.

Sentence Repetition in Deaf Children with Specific Language Impairment in British Sign Language

Science.gov (United States)

Marshall, Chloë; Mason, Kathryn; Rowley, Katherine; Herman, Rosalind; Atkinson, Joanna; Woll, Bencie; Morgan, Gary

2015-01-01

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) perform poorly on sentence repetition tasks across different spoken languages, but until now, this methodology has not been investigated in children who have SLI in a signed language. Users of a natural sign language encode different sentence meanings through their choice of signs and by altering…

Computing Accurate Grammatical Feedback in a Virtual Writing Conference for German-Speaking Elementary-School Children: An Approach Based on Natural Language Generation

Science.gov (United States)

Harbusch, Karin; Itsova, Gergana; Koch, Ulrich; Kuhner, Christine

2009-01-01

We built a natural language processing (NLP) system implementing a "virtual writing conference" for elementary-school children, with German as the target language. Currently, state-of-the-art computer support for writing tasks is restricted to multiple-choice questions or quizzes because automatic parsing of the often ambiguous and fragmentary…

Does a more sophisticated storm erosion model improve probabilistic erosion estimates?

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Ranasinghe, R.W.M.R.J.B.; Callaghan, D.; Roelvink, D.

2013-01-01

The dependency between the accuracy/uncertainty of storm erosion exceedance estimates obtained via a probabilistic model and the level of sophistication of the structural function (storm erosion model) embedded in the probabilistic model is assessed via the application of Callaghan et al.'s (2008)

Prediction During Natural Language Comprehension.

Science.gov (United States)

Willems, Roel M; Frank, Stefan L; Nijhof, Annabel D; Hagoort, Peter; van den Bosch, Antal

2016-06-01

The notion of prediction is studied in cognitive neuroscience with increasing intensity. We investigated the neural basis of 2 distinct aspects of word prediction, derived from information theory, during story comprehension. We assessed the effect of entropy of next-word probability distributions as well as surprisal A computational model determined entropy and surprisal for each word in 3 literary stories. Twenty-four healthy participants listened to the same 3 stories while their brain activation was measured using fMRI. Reversed speech fragments were presented as a control condition. Brain areas sensitive to entropy were left ventral premotor cortex, left middle frontal gyrus, right inferior frontal gyrus, left inferior parietal lobule, and left supplementary motor area. Areas sensitive to surprisal were left inferior temporal sulcus ("visual word form area"), bilateral superior temporal gyrus, right amygdala, bilateral anterior temporal poles, and right inferior frontal sulcus. We conclude that prediction during language comprehension can occur at several levels of processing, including at the level of word form. Our study exemplifies the power of combining computational linguistics with cognitive neuroscience, and additionally underlines the feasibility of studying continuous spoken language materials with fMRI. © The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.

Medical subdomain classification of clinical notes using a machine learning-based natural language processing approach

OpenAIRE

Weng, Wei-Hung; Wagholikar, Kavishwar B.; McCray, Alexa T.; Szolovits, Peter; Chueh, Henry C.

2017-01-01

Background The medical subdomain of a clinical note, such as cardiology or neurology, is useful content-derived metadata for developing machine learning downstream applications. To classify the medical subdomain of a note accurately, we have constructed a machine learning-based natural language processing (NLP) pipeline and developed medical subdomain classifiers based on the content of the note. Methods We constructed the pipeline using the clinical ...

A UMLS-based spell checker for natural language processing in vaccine safety

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Liu Fang

2007-02-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background The Institute of Medicine has identified patient safety as a key goal for health care in the United States. Detecting vaccine adverse events is an important public health activity that contributes to patient safety. Reports about adverse events following immunization (AEFI from surveillance systems contain free-text components that can be analyzed using natural language processing. To extract Unified Medical Language System (UMLS concepts from free text and classify AEFI reports based on concepts they contain, we first needed to clean the text by expanding abbreviations and shortcuts and correcting spelling errors. Our objective in this paper was to create a UMLS-based spelling error correction tool as a first step in the natural language processing (NLP pipeline for AEFI reports. Methods We developed spell checking algorithms using open source tools. We used de-identified AEFI surveillance reports to create free-text data sets for analysis. After expansion of abbreviated clinical terms and shortcuts, we performed spelling correction in four steps: (1 error detection, (2 word list generation, (3 word list disambiguation and (4 error correction. We then measured the performance of the resulting spell checker by comparing it to manual correction. Results We used 12,056 words to train the spell checker and tested its performance on 8,131 words. During testing, sensitivity, specificity, and positive predictive value (PPV for the spell checker were 74% (95% CI: 74–75, 100% (95% CI: 100–100, and 47% (95% CI: 46%–48%, respectively. Conclusion We created a prototype spell checker that can be used to process AEFI reports. We used the UMLS Specialist Lexicon as the primary source of dictionary terms and the WordNet lexicon as a secondary source. We used the UMLS as a domain-specific source of dictionary terms to compare potentially misspelled words in the corpus. The prototype sensitivity was comparable to currently available

Natural language metaphors covertly influence reasoning.

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Paul H Thibodeau

Full Text Available Metaphors pervade discussions of social issues like climate change, the economy, and crime. We ask how natural language metaphors shape the way people reason about such social issues. In previous work, we showed that describing crime metaphorically as a beast or a virus, led people to generate different solutions to a city's crime problem. In the current series of studies, instead of asking people to generate a solution on their own, we provided them with a selection of possible solutions and asked them to choose the best ones. We found that metaphors influenced people's reasoning even when they had a set of options available to compare and select among. These findings suggest that metaphors can influence not just what solution comes to mind first, but also which solution people think is best, even when given the opportunity to explicitly compare alternatives. Further, we tested whether participants were aware of the metaphor. We found that very few participants thought the metaphor played an important part in their decision. Further, participants who had no explicit memory of the metaphor were just as much affected by the metaphor as participants who were able to remember the metaphorical frame. These findings suggest that metaphors can act covertly in reasoning. Finally, we examined the role of political affiliation on reasoning about crime. The results confirm our previous findings that Republicans are more likely to generate enforcement and punishment solutions for dealing with crime, and are less swayed by metaphor than are Democrats or Independents.

Early Science Instruction and Academic Language Development Can Go Hand in Hand. The Promising Effects of a Low-Intensity Teacher-Focused Intervention

Science.gov (United States)

Henrichs, Lotte F.; Leseman, Paul P. M.

2014-11-01

Early science instruction is important in order to lay a firm basis for learning scientific concepts and scientific thinking. In addition, young children enjoy science. However, science plays only a minor role in the kindergarten curriculum. It has been reported that teachers feel they need to prioritize language and literacy practices over science. In this paper, we investigate whether science lessons might be integrated with learning the language functional for school: academic language. The occurrence of scientific reasoning and sophisticated vocabulary in brief science lessons with 5-year-olds is evaluated. The aim of the study was twofold: first, to explore the nature of kindergarten science discourse without any researcher directions (pre-intervention observation). Second, in a randomized control trial, we evaluated the effect on science discourse of a brief teacher training session focused on academic language awareness. The science lessons focussed on air pressure and mirror reflection. Analyses showed that teachers from the intervention group increased their use of scientific reasoning and of domain-specific academic words in their science discourse, compared to the control group. For the use of general academic words and for lexical diversity, the effect was task-specific: these dependent measures only increased during the air pressure task. Implications of the study include the need to increase teachers' awareness of possibilities to combine early science instruction and academic language learning.

Automated assessment of patients' self-narratives for posttraumatic stress disorder screening using natural language processing and text mining

NARCIS (Netherlands)

He, Qiwei; Veldkamp, Bernard P.; Glas, Cornelis A.W.; de Vries, Theo

2017-01-01

Patients’ narratives about traumatic experiences and symptoms are useful in clinical screening and diagnostic procedures. In this study, we presented an automated assessment system to screen patients for posttraumatic stress disorder via a natural language processing and text-mining approach. Four

Prediction of Emergency Department Hospital Admission Based on Natural Language Processing and Neural Networks.

Science.gov (United States)

Zhang, Xingyu; Kim, Joyce; Patzer, Rachel E; Pitts, Stephen R; Patzer, Aaron; Schrager, Justin D

2017-10-26

To describe and compare logistic regression and neural network modeling strategies to predict hospital admission or transfer following initial presentation to Emergency Department (ED) triage with and without the addition of natural language processing elements. Using data from the National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey (NHAMCS), a cross-sectional probability sample of United States EDs from 2012 and 2013 survey years, we developed several predictive models with the outcome being admission to the hospital or transfer vs. discharge home. We included patient characteristics immediately available after the patient has presented to the ED and undergone a triage process. We used this information to construct logistic regression (LR) and multilayer neural network models (MLNN) which included natural language processing (NLP) and principal component analysis from the patient's reason for visit. Ten-fold cross validation was used to test the predictive capacity of each model and receiver operating curves (AUC) were then calculated for each model. Of the 47,200 ED visits from 642 hospitals, 6,335 (13.42%) resulted in hospital admission (or transfer). A total of 48 principal components were extracted by NLP from the reason for visit fields, which explained 75% of the overall variance for hospitalization. In the model including only structured variables, the AUC was 0.824 (95% CI 0.818-0.830) for logistic regression and 0.823 (95% CI 0.817-0.829) for MLNN. Models including only free-text information generated AUC of 0.742 (95% CI 0.731- 0.753) for logistic regression and 0.753 (95% CI 0.742-0.764) for MLNN. When both structured variables and free text variables were included, the AUC reached 0.846 (95% CI 0.839-0.853) for logistic regression and 0.844 (95% CI 0.836-0.852) for MLNN. The predictive accuracy of hospital admission or transfer for patients who presented to ED triage overall was good, and was improved with the inclusion of free text data from a patient

Sophisticating a naive Liapunov function

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Smith, D.; Lewins, J.D.

1985-01-01

The art of the direct method of Liapunov to determine system stability is to construct a suitable Liapunov or V function where V is to be positive definite (PD), to shrink to a center, which may be conveniently chosen as the origin, and where V is the negative definite (ND). One aid to the art is to solve an approximation to the system equations in order to provide a candidate V function. It can happen, however, that the V function is not strictly ND but vanishes at a finite number of isolated points. Naively, one anticipates that stability has been demonstrated since the trajectory of the system at such points is only momentarily tangential and immediately enters a region of inward directed trajectories. To demonstrate stability rigorously requires the construction of a sophisticated Liapunov function from what can be called the naive original choice. In this paper, the authors demonstrate the method of perturbing the naive function in the context of the well-known second-order oscillator and then apply the method to a more complicated problem based on a prompt jump model for a nuclear fission reactor

Strategic sophistication of individuals and teams. Experimental evidence

Science.gov (United States)

Sutter, Matthias; Czermak, Simon; Feri, Francesco

2013-01-01

Many important decisions require strategic sophistication. We examine experimentally whether teams act more strategically than individuals. We let individuals and teams make choices in simple games, and also elicit first- and second-order beliefs. We find that teams play the Nash equilibrium strategy significantly more often, and their choices are more often a best response to stated first order beliefs. Distributional preferences make equilibrium play less likely. Using a mixture model, the estimated probability to play strategically is 62% for teams, but only 40% for individuals. A model of noisy introspection reveals that teams differ from individuals in higher order beliefs. PMID:24926100

Simplexity, languages and human languaging

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Cowley, Stephen; Gahrn-Andersen, Rasmus

2018-01-01

Building on a distributed perspective, the Special Issue develops Alain Berthoz's concept of simplexity. By so doing, neurophysiology is used to reach beyond observable and, specifically, 1st-order languaging. While simplexity clarifies how language uses perception/action, a community's ‘lexicon......’ (a linguistic 2nd order) also shapes human powers. People use global constraints to make and construe wordings and bring a social/individual duality to human living. Within a field of perception-action-language, the phenomenology of ‘words’ and ‘things’ drives people to sustain their own experience....... Simplex tricks used in building bodies co-function with action that grants humans access to en-natured culture where, together, they build human knowing....

Querying Natural Logic Knowledge Bases

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Andreasen, Troels; Bulskov, Henrik; Jensen, Per Anker

2017-01-01

This paper describes the principles of a system applying natural logic as a knowledge base language. Natural logics are regimented fragments of natural language employing high level inference rules. We advocate the use of natural logic for knowledge bases dealing with querying of classes...... in ontologies and class-relationships such as are common in life-science descriptions. The paper adopts a version of natural logic with recursive restrictive clauses such as relative clauses and adnominal prepositional phrases. It includes passive as well as active voice sentences. We outline a prototype...... for partial translation of natural language into natural logic, featuring further querying and conceptual path finding in natural logic knowledge bases....

Descriptive Metaphysics, Natural Language Metaphysics, Sapir-Whorf, and All That Stuff: Evidence from the Mass-Count Distinction

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Francis Jeffry Pelletier

2010-12-01

Full Text Available Strawson (1959 described ‘descriptive metaphysics’, Bach (1986a described ‘natural language metaphysics’, Sapir (1929 and Whorf (1940a,b, 1941 describe, well, Sapir-Whorfianism. And there are other views concerning the relation between correct semantic analysis of linguistic phenomena and the “reality” that is supposed to be thereby described. I think some considerations from the analyses of the mass-count distinction can shed some light on that very dark topic.ReferencesBach, Emmon. 1986a. ‘Natural Language Metaphysics’. In Ruth Barcan Marcus, G.J.W. Dorn & Paul Weingartner (eds. ‘Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science, VII’, 573–595. Amsterdam: North Holland.Bach, Emmon. 1986b. ‘The Algebra of Events’. Linguistics and Philosophy 9: 5–16.Berger, Peter & Luckmann, Thomas. 1966. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. New York: Doubleday.Boroditsky, Lera, Schmidt, Lauren & Phillips, Webb. 2003. ‘Sex, Syntax, and Semantics’. In Dedre Gentner & Susan Goldin-Meadow (eds. ‘Language in Mind: Advances in the Study of Language and Cognition’, 59–80. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Cheng, L. & Sybesma, R. 1999. ‘Bare and Not-So-Bare Nouns and the structure of NP’. Linguistic Inquiry 30: 509–542.http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/002438999554192Chierchia, Gennaro. 1998a. ‘Reference to Kinds across Languages’. Natural Language Semantics 6: 339–405.http://dx.doi.org/10.1023/A:1008324218506Chierchia, Gennaro. 1998b. ‘Plurality of Mass Nouns and the Notion of ‘Semantic Parameter’ ’. In S. Rothstein (ed. ‘Events and Grammar’, 53–103. Dordrecht: Kluwer.Chierchia, Gennaro. 2010. ‘Mass Nouns, Vagueness and Semantic Variation’. Synthèse 174: 99–149.http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11229-009-9686-6Doetjes, Jenny. 1997. Quantifiers and Selection: On the Distribution of Quantifying Expressions in French, Dutch and English. Ph.D. thesis, University of Leiden, Holland

CLAMP - a toolkit for efficiently building customized clinical natural language processing pipelines.

Science.gov (United States)

Soysal, Ergin; Wang, Jingqi; Jiang, Min; Wu, Yonghui; Pakhomov, Serguei; Liu, Hongfang; Xu, Hua

2017-11-24

Existing general clinical natural language processing (NLP) systems such as MetaMap and Clinical Text Analysis and Knowledge Extraction System have been successfully applied to information extraction from clinical text. However, end users often have to customize existing systems for their individual tasks, which can require substantial NLP skills. Here we present CLAMP (Clinical Language Annotation, Modeling, and Processing), a newly developed clinical NLP toolkit that provides not only state-of-the-art NLP components, but also a user-friendly graphic user interface that can help users quickly build customized NLP pipelines for their individual applications. Our evaluation shows that the CLAMP default pipeline achieved good performance on named entity recognition and concept encoding. We also demonstrate the efficiency of the CLAMP graphic user interface in building customized, high-performance NLP pipelines with 2 use cases, extracting smoking status and lab test values. CLAMP is publicly available for research use, and we believe it is a unique asset for the clinical NLP community. © The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Medical Informatics Association. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com.

Computer-Assisted Language Learning : proceedings of the seventh Twente Workshop on Language Technology

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Appelo, L.; de Jong, Franciska M.G.

1994-01-01

TWLT is an acronym of Twente Workshop(s) on Language Technology. These workshops on natural language theory and technology are organised bij Project Parlevink (sometimes with the help of others) a language theory and technology project conducted at the Department of Computer Science of the

Intelligent Performance Analysis with a Natural Language Interface

Science.gov (United States)

Juuso, Esko K.

2017-09-01

Performance improvement is taken as the primary goal in the asset management. Advanced data analysis is needed to efficiently integrate condition monitoring data into the operation and maintenance. Intelligent stress and condition indices have been developed for control and condition monitoring by combining generalized norms with efficient nonlinear scaling. These nonlinear scaling methodologies can also be used to handle performance measures used for management since management oriented indicators can be presented in the same scale as intelligent condition and stress indices. Performance indicators are responses of the process, machine or system to the stress contributions analyzed from process and condition monitoring data. Scaled values are directly used in intelligent temporal analysis to calculate fluctuations and trends. All these methodologies can be used in prognostics and fatigue prediction. The meanings of the variables are beneficial in extracting expert knowledge and representing information in natural language. The idea of dividing the problems into the variable specific meanings and the directions of interactions provides various improvements for performance monitoring and decision making. The integrated temporal analysis and uncertainty processing facilitates the efficient use of domain expertise. Measurements can be monitored with generalized statistical process control (GSPC) based on the same scaling functions.

Evolution: Language Use and the Evolution of Languages

Science.gov (United States)

Croft, William

Language change can be understood as an evolutionary process. Language change occurs at two different timescales, corresponding to the two steps of the evolutionary process. The first timescale is very short, namely, the production of an utterance: this is where linguistic structures are replicated and language variation is generated. The second timescale is (or can be) very long, namely, the propagation of linguistic variants in the speech community: this is where certain variants are selected over others. At both timescales, the evolutionary process is driven by social interaction and the role language plays in it. An understanding of social interaction at the micro-level—face-to-face interactions—and at the macro-level—the structure of speech communities—gives us the basis for understanding the generation and propagation of language structures, and understanding the nature of language itself.

Knowledge-based machine indexing from natural language text: Knowledge base design, development, and maintenance

Science.gov (United States)

Genuardi, Michael T.

1993-01-01

One strategy for machine-aided indexing (MAI) is to provide a concept-level analysis of the textual elements of documents or document abstracts. In such systems, natural-language phrases are analyzed in order to identify and classify concepts related to a particular subject domain. The overall performance of these MAI systems is largely dependent on the quality and comprehensiveness of their knowledge bases. These knowledge bases function to (1) define the relations between a controlled indexing vocabulary and natural language expressions; (2) provide a simple mechanism for disambiguation and the determination of relevancy; and (3) allow the extension of concept-hierarchical structure to all elements of the knowledge file. After a brief description of the NASA Machine-Aided Indexing system, concerns related to the development and maintenance of MAI knowledge bases are discussed. Particular emphasis is given to statistically-based text analysis tools designed to aid the knowledge base developer. One such tool, the Knowledge Base Building (KBB) program, presents the domain expert with a well-filtered list of synonyms and conceptually-related phrases for each thesaurus concept. Another tool, the Knowledge Base Maintenance (KBM) program, functions to identify areas of the knowledge base affected by changes in the conceptual domain (for example, the addition of a new thesaurus term). An alternate use of the KBM as an aid in thesaurus construction is also discussed.

Visualizing Patient Journals by Combining Vital Signs Monitoring and Natural Language Processing

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Vilic, Adnan; Petersen, John Asger; Hoppe, Karsten

2016-01-01

This paper presents a data-driven approach to graphically presenting text-based patient journals while still maintaining all textual information. The system first creates a timeline representation of a patients’ physiological condition during an admission, which is assessed by electronically...... monitoring vital signs and then combining these into Early Warning Scores (EWS). Hereafter, techniques from Natural Language Processing (NLP) are applied on the existing patient journal to extract all entries. Finally, the two methods are combined into an interactive timeline featuring the ability to see...... drastic changes in the patients’ health, and thereby enabling staff to see where in the journal critical events have taken place....

Body Language Advanced 3D Character Rigging

CERN Document Server

Allen, Eric; Fong, Jared; Sidwell, Adam G

2011-01-01

Whether you're a professional Character TD or just like to create 3D characters, this detailed guide reveals the techniques you need to create sophisticated 3D character rigs that range from basic to breathtaking. Packed with step-by-step instructions and full-color illustrations, Body Language walks you through rigging techniques for all the body parts to help you create realistic and believable movements in every character you design. You'll learn advanced rigging concepts that involve MEL scripting and advanced deformation techniques and even how to set up a character pipeline.

LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS FOR THE BELARUSIAN CORPUS WITH THE APPLICATION OF NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING AND MACHINE LEARNING TECHNIQUES

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Yu. S. Hetsevich

2017-01-01

Full Text Available The article focuses on the problems existing in text-to-speech synthesis. Different morphological, lexical and syntactical elements were localized with the help of the Belarusian unit of NooJ program. Those types of errors, which occur in Belarusian texts, were analyzed and corrected. Language model and part of speech tagging model were built. The natural language processing of Belarusian corpus with the help of developed algorithm using machine learning was carried out. The precision of developed models of machine learning has been 80–90 %. The dictionary was enriched with new words for the further using it in the systems of Belarusian speech synthesis.

Computers and Languages: Theory and Practice

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Nijholt, Antinus

A global introduction to language technology and the areas of computer science where language technology plays a role. Surveyed in this volume are issueas related to the parsing problem in the fields of natural languages, programming languages, and formal languages. Throughout the book attention is

Simulation language of DSNP: dynamic simulator for nuclear power-plants

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Saphier, D.

1978-09-01

The Dynamic Simulator for Nuclear Power-plants (DSNP) is a system of programs and data sets by which a nuclear power plant or part thereof can be simulated at different levels of sophistication. The acronym DSNP is used interchangeably for the DSNP language, for the DSNP precompiler, for the DSNP libraries, and for the DSNP document generator. The DSNP language is a set of simple block oriented statements, which together with the appropriate data, comprise a simulation of a nuclear power plant. The majority of the DSNP statements will result in the inclusion of a simulated physical module into the program. FORTRAN statements can be inserted with no restrictions among DSNP statements

The Tao of Whole Language.

Science.gov (United States)

Zola, Meguido

1989-01-01

Uses the philosophy of Taoism as a metaphor in describing the whole language approach to language arts instruction. The discussion covers the key principles that inform the whole language approach, the resulting holistic nature of language programs, and the role of the teacher in this approach. (16 references) (CLB)

Development Strategies for Tourism Destinations: Tourism Sophistication vs. Resource Investments

OpenAIRE

Rainer Andergassen; Guido Candela

2010-01-01

This paper investigates the effectiveness of development strategies for tourism destinations. We argue that resource investments unambiguously increase tourism revenues and that increasing the degree of tourism sophistication, that is increasing the variety of tourism related goods and services, increases tourism activity and decreases the perceived quality of the destination's resource endowment, leading to an ambiguous effect on tourism revenues. We disentangle these two effects and charact...

RLL-1: A Representation Language Language

Science.gov (United States)

1980-10-01

adaptable organisms over those which contain, built-in optimized features. Compare the extinct dinosaur , unable to adapt to new situations, with two of...natural language understandirq for KRL [Bobrow & Winograd] and OWL [Szolovits, et alD. For this reason , his language is ofL.:n inadequate for any...for no particular reason , switch the organ into its Oboe state. That is, the sequence which triggers a change to the organ is a Punction of the organ’s

How many kinds of reasoning? Inference, probability, and natural language semantics.

Science.gov (United States)

Lassiter, Daniel; Goodman, Noah D

2015-03-01

The "new paradigm" unifying deductive and inductive reasoning in a Bayesian framework (Oaksford & Chater, 2007; Over, 2009) has been claimed to be falsified by results which show sharp differences between reasoning about necessity vs. plausibility (Heit & Rotello, 2010; Rips, 2001; Rotello & Heit, 2009). We provide a probabilistic model of reasoning with modal expressions such as "necessary" and "plausible" informed by recent work in formal semantics of natural language, and show that it predicts the possibility of non-linear response patterns which have been claimed to be problematic. Our model also makes a strong monotonicity prediction, while two-dimensional theories predict the possibility of reversals in argument strength depending on the modal word chosen. Predictions were tested using a novel experimental paradigm that replicates the previously-reported response patterns with a minimal manipulation, changing only one word of the stimulus between conditions. We found a spectrum of reasoning "modes" corresponding to different modal words, and strong support for our model's monotonicity prediction. This indicates that probabilistic approaches to reasoning can account in a clear and parsimonious way for data previously argued to falsify them, as well as new, more fine-grained, data. It also illustrates the importance of careful attention to the semantics of language employed in reasoning experiments. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Do organizations adopt sophisticated capital budgeting practices to deal with uncertainty in the investment decision? : A research note

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Verbeeten, Frank H M

This study examines the impact of uncertainty on the sophistication of capital budgeting practices. While the theoretical applications of sophisticated capital budgeting practices (defined as the use of real option reasoning and/or game theory decision rules) have been well documented, empirical

Dialogue-Games: Meta-Communication Structures for Natural Language Interaction

Science.gov (United States)

1977-01-01

analogy from Wittgenstein’s term "language game" ( Wittgenstein , 1958). However, Dialogue-games represent knowledge people have about language as used to...and memory of narrative discourse. CoRtiiiive PsycholoRy, 1977, 9, 77-110. Wittgenstein , L. Philosophical inve-ÜRalions (3rd ed.). New York

Gendered Language in Interactive Discourse

Science.gov (United States)

Hussey, Karen A.; Katz, Albert N.; Leith, Scott A.

2015-01-01

Over two studies, we examined the nature of gendered language in interactive discourse. In the first study, we analyzed gendered language from a chat corpus to see whether tokens of gendered language proposed in the gender-as-culture hypothesis (Maltz and Borker in "Language and social identity." Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp…

Automatic Lung-RADS™ classification with a natural language processing system.

Science.gov (United States)

Beyer, Sebastian E; McKee, Brady J; Regis, Shawn M; McKee, Andrea B; Flacke, Sebastian; El Saadawi, Gilan; Wald, Christoph

2017-09-01

Our aim was to train a natural language processing (NLP) algorithm to capture imaging characteristics of lung nodules reported in a structured CT report and suggest the applicable Lung-RADS™ (LR) category. Our study included structured, clinical reports of consecutive CT lung screening (CTLS) exams performed from 08/2014 to 08/2015 at an ACR accredited Lung Cancer Screening Center. All patients screened were at high-risk for lung cancer according to the NCCN Guidelines ® . All exams were interpreted by one of three radiologists credentialed to read CTLS exams using LR using a standard reporting template. Training and test sets consisted of consecutive exams. Lung screening exams were divided into two groups: three training sets (500, 120, and 383 reports each) and one final evaluation set (498 reports). NLP algorithm results were compared with the gold standard of LR category assigned by the radiologist. The sensitivity/specificity of the NLP algorithm to correctly assign LR categories for suspicious nodules (LR 4) and positive nodules (LR 3/4) were 74.1%/98.6% and 75.0%/98.8% respectively. The majority of mismatches occurred in cases where pulmonary findings were present not currently addressed by LR. Misclassifications also resulted from the failure to identify exams as follow-up and the failure to completely characterize part-solid nodules. In a sub-group analysis among structured reports with standardized language, the sensitivity and specificity to detect LR 4 nodules were 87.0% and 99.5%, respectively. An NLP system can accurately suggest the appropriate LR category from CTLS exam findings when standardized reporting is used.

What baboons can (not) tell us about natural language grammars.

Science.gov (United States)

Poletiek, Fenna H; Fitz, Hartmut; Bocanegra, Bruno R

2016-06-01

Rey et al. (2012) present data from a study with baboons that they interpret in support of the idea that center-embedded structures in human language have their origin in low level memory mechanisms and associative learning. Critically, the authors claim that the baboons showed a behavioral preference that is consistent with center-embedded sequences over other types of sequences. We argue that the baboons' response patterns suggest that two mechanisms are involved: first, they can be trained to associate a particular response with a particular stimulus, and, second, when faced with two conditioned stimuli in a row, they respond to the most recent one first, copying behavior they had been rewarded for during training. Although Rey et al. (2012) 'experiment shows that the baboons' behavior is driven by low level mechanisms, it is not clear how the animal behavior reported, bears on the phenomenon of Center Embedded structures in human syntax. Hence, (1) natural language syntax may indeed have been shaped by low level mechanisms, and (2) the baboons' behavior is driven by low level stimulus response learning, as Rey et al. propose. But is the second evidence for the first? We will discuss in what ways this study can and cannot give evidential value for explaining the origin of Center Embedded recursion in human grammar. More generally, their study provokes an interesting reflection on the use of animal studies in order to understand features of the human linguistic system. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

RProtoBuf: Efficient Cross-Language Data Serialization in R

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Dirk Eddelbuettel

2016-07-01

Full Text Available Modern data collection and analysis pipelines often involve a sophisticated mix of applications written in general purpose and specialized programming languages. Many formats commonly used to import and export data between different programs or systems, such as CSV or JSON, are verbose, inefficient, not type-safe, or tied to a specific programming language. Protocol Buffers are a popular method of serializing structured data between applications - while remaining independent of programming languages or operating systems. They offer a unique combination of features, performance, and maturity that seems particularly well suited for data-driven applications and numerical computing. The RProtoBuf package provides a complete interface to Protocol Buffers from the R environment for statistical computing. This paper outlines the general class of data serialization requirements for statistical computing, describes the implementation of the RProtoBuf package, and illustrates its use with example applications in large-scale data collection pipelines and web services.

Factors Influencing Sensitivity to Lexical Tone in an Artificial Language: Implications for Second Language Learning

Science.gov (United States)

Caldwell-Harris, Catherine L.; Lancaster, Alia; Ladd, D. Robert; Dediu, Dan; Christiansen, Morten H.

2015-01-01

This study examined whether musical training, ethnicity, and experience with a natural tone language influenced sensitivity to tone while listening to an artificial tone language. The language was designed with three tones, modeled after level-tone African languages. Participants listened to a 15-min random concatenation of six 3-syllable words.…

Storytelling, behavior planning, and language evolution in context.

Science.gov (United States)

McBride, Glen

2014-01-01

An attempt is made to specify the structure of the hominin bands that began steps to language. Storytelling could evolve without need for language yet be strongly subject to natural selection and could provide a major feedback process in evolving language. A storytelling model is examined, including its effects on the evolution of consciousness and the possible timing of language evolution. Behavior planning is presented as a model of language evolution from storytelling. The behavior programming mechanism in both directions provide a model of creating and understanding behavior and language. Culture began with societies, then family evolution, family life in troops, but storytelling created a culture of experiences, a final step in the long process of achieving experienced adults by natural selection. Most language evolution occurred in conversations where evolving non-verbal feedback ensured mutual agreements on understanding. Natural language evolved in conversations with feedback providing understanding of changes.

Arabic text preprocessing for the natural language processing applications

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Awajan, A.

2007-01-01

A new approach for processing vowelized and unvowelized Arabic texts in order to prepare them for Natural Language Processing (NLP) purposes is described. The developed approach is rule-based and made up of four phases: text tokenization, word light stemming, word's morphological analysis and text annotation. The first phase preprocesses the input text in order to isolate the words and represent them in a formal way. The second phase applies a light stemmer in order to extract the stem of each word by eliminating the prefixes and suffixes. The third phase is a rule-based morphological analyzer that determines the root and the morphological pattern for each extracted stem. The last phase produces an annotated text where each word is tagged with its morphological attributes. The preprocessor presented in this paper is capable of dealing with vowelized and unvowelized words, and provides the input words along with relevant linguistics information needed by different applications. It is designed to be used with different NLP applications such as machine translation text summarization, text correction, information retrieval and automatic vowelization of Arabic Text. (author)

Language Ideologies in a Danish Company with English as a Corporate Language

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Lønsmann, Dorte

2015-01-01

with Danish. While previous studies of English as an international language have tended to focus on the consequences for the local language, this article also includes a discussion of the role of English in relation to other international languages. English is constructed as the international language......With the spread of English as a global language, concerns have been voiced over the impact of English on local languages. This article presents results from an ethnographic study of language ideologies in a Danish workplace with a particular focus on ideologies of English in relation to the local...... language and to other foreign languages. In this international company, conflicting ideologies construct the local language Danish on the one hand as the natural language in Denmark, but as unimportant compared to English on the other hand. English is constructed as prestigious and powerful in contrast...

The Value of Multivariate Model Sophistication: An Application to pricing Dow Jones Industrial Average options

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Rombouts, Jeroen V.K.; Stentoft, Lars; Violante, Francesco

innovation for a Laplace innovation assumption improves the pricing in a smaller way. Apart from investigating directly the value of model sophistication in terms of dollar losses, we also use the model condence set approach to statistically infer the set of models that delivers the best pricing performance.......We assess the predictive accuracy of a large number of multivariate volatility models in terms of pricing options on the Dow Jones Industrial Average. We measure the value of model sophistication in terms of dollar losses by considering a set 248 multivariate models that differer...

Sophistic Ethics in the Technical Writing Classroom: Teaching "Nomos," Deliberation, and Action.

Science.gov (United States)

Scott, J. Blake

1995-01-01

Claims that teaching ethics is particularly important to technical writing. Outlines a classical, sophistic approach to ethics based on the theories and pedagogies of Protagoras, Gorgias, and Isocrates, which emphasizes the Greek concept of "nomos," internal and external deliberation, and responsible action. Discusses problems and…

Efficient construction of approximate call graphs for JavaScript IDE services

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Feldthaus, Asger; Schäfer, Max; Sridharan, Manu

2013-01-01

The rapid rise of JavaScript as one of the most popular programming languages of the present day has led to a demand for sophisticated IDE support similar to what is available for Java or C#. However, advanced tooling is hampered by the dynamic nature of the language, which makes any form of stat...

Storytelling, behavior planning and language evolution in context.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Glen eMcbride

2014-10-01

Full Text Available An attempt is made to specify the structure of the hominin bands that began steps to language. 8 Storytelling could evolve without need for language yet be strongly subject to natural selection 9 and could provide a major feedback process in evolving language. A storytelling model is 10 examined, including its effects on the evolution of consciousness and the possible timing of 11 language evolution. Behavior planning is presented as a model of language evolution from 12 storytelling. The behavior programming mechanism in both directions provide a model of 13 creating and understanding behavior and language. Culture began with societies, then family 14 evolution, family life in troops, but storytelling created a culture of experiences, a final step in 15 the long process of achieving experienced adults by natural selection. Most language evolution 16 occurred in conversations where evolving non-verbal feedback ensured mutual agreements on 17 understanding. Natural language evolved in conversations with feedback providing 18 understanding of changes.

Sophisticated Fowl: The Complex Behaviour and Cognitive Skills of Chickens and Red Junglefowl

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Laura Garnham

2018-01-01

Full Text Available The world’s most numerous bird, the domestic chicken, and their wild ancestor, the red junglefowl, have long been used as model species for animal behaviour research. Recently, this research has advanced our understanding of the social behaviour, personality, and cognition of fowl, and demonstrated their sophisticated behaviour and cognitive skills. Here, we overview some of this research, starting with describing research investigating the well-developed senses of fowl, before presenting how socially and cognitively complex they can be. The realisation that domestic chickens, our most abundant production animal, are behaviourally and cognitively sophisticated should encourage an increase in general appraise and fascination towards them. In turn, this should inspire increased use of them as both research and hobby animals, as well as improvements in their unfortunately often poor welfare.

Positivity of the English Language

Science.gov (United States)

Kloumann, Isabel M.; Danforth, Christopher M.; Harris, Kameron Decker; Bliss, Catherine A.; Dodds, Peter Sheridan

2012-01-01

Over the last million years, human language has emerged and evolved as a fundamental instrument of social communication and semiotic representation. People use language in part to convey emotional information, leading to the central and contingent questions: (1) What is the emotional spectrum of natural language? and (2) Are natural languages neutrally, positively, or negatively biased? Here, we report that the human-perceived positivity of over 10,000 of the most frequently used English words exhibits a clear positive bias. More deeply, we characterize and quantify distributions of word positivity for four large and distinct corpora, demonstrating that their form is broadly invariant with respect to frequency of word use. PMID:22247779

Positivity of the English language.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Isabel M Kloumann

Full Text Available Over the last million years, human language has emerged and evolved as a fundamental instrument of social communication and semiotic representation. People use language in part to convey emotional information, leading to the central and contingent questions: (1 What is the emotional spectrum of natural language? and (2 Are natural languages neutrally, positively, or negatively biased? Here, we report that the human-perceived positivity of over 10,000 of the most frequently used English words exhibits a clear positive bias. More deeply, we characterize and quantify distributions of word positivity for four large and distinct corpora, demonstrating that their form is broadly invariant with respect to frequency of word use.

Attitudes and Language. Multilingual Matters: 83.

Science.gov (United States)

Baker, Colin

This book examines language attitudes, focusing on individual attitudes toward majority and minority languages and bilingualism. Special emphasis is placed on research conducted on language attitudes in Wales toward the Welsh and English languages. Six chapters address the following: (1) the nature, definition, and measurement of language…

Language and Social Identity Construction: A Study of a Russian Heritage Language Orthodox Christian School

Science.gov (United States)

Moore, Ekaterina Leonidovna

2012-01-01

Grounded in discourse analytic and language socialization paradigms, this dissertation examines issues of language and social identity construction in children attending a Russian Heritage Language Orthodox Christian Saturday School in California. By conducting micro-analysis of naturally-occurring talk-in-interaction combined with longitudinal…

Generation of Natural-Language Textual Summaries from Longitudinal Clinical Records.

Science.gov (United States)

Goldstein, Ayelet; Shahar, Yuval

2015-01-01

Physicians are required to interpret, abstract and present in free-text large amounts of clinical data in their daily tasks. This is especially true for chronic-disease domains, but holds also in other clinical domains. We have recently developed a prototype system, CliniText, which, given a time-oriented clinical database, and appropriate formal abstraction and summarization knowledge, combines the computational mechanisms of knowledge-based temporal data abstraction, textual summarization, abduction, and natural-language generation techniques, to generate an intelligent textual summary of longitudinal clinical data. We demonstrate our methodology, and the feasibility of providing a free-text summary of longitudinal electronic patient records, by generating summaries in two very different domains - Diabetes Management and Cardiothoracic surgery. In particular, we explain the process of generating a discharge summary of a patient who had undergone a Coronary Artery Bypass Graft operation, and a brief summary of the treatment of a diabetes patient for five years.

Naturalizing language: human appraisal and (quasi) technology

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Cowley, Stephen

2013-01-01

Using contemporary science, the paper builds on Wittgenstein’s views of human language. Rather than ascribing reality to inscription-like entities, it links embodiment with distributed cognition. The verbal or (quasi) technological aspect of language is traced to not action, but human specific...... interactivity. This species-specific form of sense-making sustains, among other things, using texts, making/construing phonetic gestures and thinking. Human action is thus grounded in appraisals or sense-saturated coordination. To illustrate interactivity at work, the paper focuses on a case study. Over 11 s......, a crime scene investigator infers that she is probably dealing with an inside job: she uses not words, but intelligent gaze. This connects professional expertise to circumstances and the feeling of thinking. It is suggested that, as for other species, human appraisal is based in synergies. However, since...

Flexible Dermal Armor : Designs Learned from Nature

OpenAIRE

Chen, Irene Hsu

2015-01-01

Designs derived from nature have become a perfect blueprint for today's engineers and scientists to follow and implement. One particularly noted area is the defense industry, wherein flexible dermal armor inspired by nature has been pioneering many sophisticated technologies and designs in recent years. Designers today are considering borrowing aspects of flexibility and mobility of natural dermal armors to enhance the maneuverability of man-made armor by imitating the following mechanisms : ...

Language and Speech in Autism.

Science.gov (United States)

Gernsbacher, Morton Ann; Morson, Emily M; Grace, Elizabeth J

2016-01-01

Autism is a developmental disability characterized by atypical social interaction, interests or body movements, and communication. Our review examines the empirical status of three communication phenomena believed to be unique to autism: pronoun reversal (using the pronoun you when the pronoun I is intended, and vice versa), echolalia (repeating what someone has said), and a reduced or even reversed production-comprehension lag (a reduction or reversal of the well-established finding that speakers produce less sophisticated language than they can comprehend). Each of these three phenomena has been claimed to be unique to autism; therefore, each has been proposed to be diagnostic of autism, and each has been interpreted in autism-centric ways (psychoanalytic interpretations of pronoun reversal, behaviorist interpretations of echolalia, and clinical lore about the production-comprehension lag). However, as our review demonstrates, none of these three phenomena is in fact unique to autism; none can or should serve as diagnostic of autism, and all call into question unwarranted assumptions about autistic persons and their language development and use.

Assessing Epistemic Sophistication by Considering Domain-Specific Absolute and Multiplicistic Beliefs Separately

Science.gov (United States)

Peter, Johannes; Rosman, Tom; Mayer, Anne-Kathrin; Leichner, Nikolas; Krampen, Günter

2016-01-01

Background: Particularly in higher education, not only a view of science as a means of finding absolute truths (absolutism), but also a view of science as generally tentative (multiplicism) can be unsophisticated and obstructive for learning. Most quantitative epistemic belief inventories neglect this and understand epistemic sophistication as…

A corpus of full-text journal articles is a robust evaluation tool for revealing differences in performance of biomedical natural language processing tools.

Science.gov (United States)

Verspoor, Karin; Cohen, Kevin Bretonnel; Lanfranchi, Arrick; Warner, Colin; Johnson, Helen L; Roeder, Christophe; Choi, Jinho D; Funk, Christopher; Malenkiy, Yuriy; Eckert, Miriam; Xue, Nianwen; Baumgartner, William A; Bada, Michael; Palmer, Martha; Hunter, Lawrence E

2012-08-17

We introduce the linguistic annotation of a corpus of 97 full-text biomedical publications, known as the Colorado Richly Annotated Full Text (CRAFT) corpus. We further assess the performance of existing tools for performing sentence splitting, tokenization, syntactic parsing, and named entity recognition on this corpus. Many biomedical natural language processing systems demonstrated large differences between their previously published results and their performance on the CRAFT corpus when tested with the publicly available models or rule sets. Trainable systems differed widely with respect to their ability to build high-performing models based on this data. The finding that some systems were able to train high-performing models based on this corpus is additional evidence, beyond high inter-annotator agreement, that the quality of the CRAFT corpus is high. The overall poor performance of various systems indicates that considerable work needs to be done to enable natural language processing systems to work well when the input is full-text journal articles. The CRAFT corpus provides a valuable resource to the biomedical natural language processing community for evaluation and training of new models for biomedical full text publications.

The Nature of the Language Faculty and Its Implications for Evolution of Language (Reply to Fitch, Hauser, and Chomsky)

Science.gov (United States)

Jackendoff, Ray; Pinker, Steven

2005-01-01

In a continuation of the conversation with Fitch, Chomsky, and Hauser on the evolution of language, we examine their defense of the claim that the uniquely human, language-specific part of the language faculty (the ''narrow language faculty'') consists only of recursion, and that this part cannot be considered an adaptation to communication. We…

The Meta-Language of Advertising in a Synergetic Vision of the World (in English Language

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Aila E. Zhumabekova

2016-06-01

Full Text Available The relevance of this article is determined by necessity of consideration of the metalanguage, which is considered a language that expresses the hidden meaning of advertising through natural language, from the point of view of linguistic analysis in the synergy aspect as a main tool used by the metalanguage in the process of representation created in the framework of this direction terminology. The article creates a lexical reservoir used on the respective orientation, which detects the connection with the language phenomena and the facts in our case in advertising. Formed the language of "second order", which is the object of the natural language in all its manifestations. The new synergetic way of thinking in the meta-language of advertising is nonlinear, and evolutionary. This is the current stage of development of linguistics as an attempt of system description meta-language of advertising and its effects on customers are different segments of the population, that is, a synergistic perception of the content of advertising texts in English and their components.

The cognitive functions of language.

Science.gov (United States)

Carruthers, Peter

2002-12-01

This paper explores a variety of different versions of the thesis that natural language is involved in human thinking. It distinguishes amongst strong and weak forms of this thesis, dismissing some as implausibly strong and others as uninterestingly weak. Strong forms dismissed include the view that language is conceptually necessary for thought (endorsed by many philosophers) and the view that language is de facto the medium of all human conceptual thinking (endorsed by many philosophers and social scientists). Weak forms include the view that language is necessary for the acquisition of many human concepts and the view that language can serve to scaffold human thought processes. The paper also discusses the thesis that language may be the medium of conscious propositional thinking, but argues that this cannot be its most fundamental cognitive role. The idea is then proposed that natural language is the medium for nondomain-specific thinking, serving to integrate the outputs of a variety of domain-specific conceptual faculties (or central-cognitive "quasimodules"). Recent experimental evidence in support of this idea is reviewed and the implications of the idea are discussed, especially for our conception of the architecture of human cognition. Finally, some further kinds of evidence which might serve to corroborate or refute the hypothesis are mentioned. The overall goal of the paper is to review a wide variety of accounts of the cognitive function of natural language, integrating a number of different kinds of evidence and theoretical consideration in order to propose and elaborate the most plausible candidate.

Automated identification of wound information in clinical notes of patients with heart diseases: Developing and validating a natural language processing application.

Science.gov (United States)

Topaz, Maxim; Lai, Kenneth; Dowding, Dawn; Lei, Victor J; Zisberg, Anna; Bowles, Kathryn H; Zhou, Li

2016-12-01

Electronic health records are being increasingly used by nurses with up to 80% of the health data recorded as free text. However, only a few studies have developed nursing-relevant tools that help busy clinicians to identify information they need at the point of care. This study developed and validated one of the first automated natural language processing applications to extract wound information (wound type, pressure ulcer stage, wound size, anatomic location, and wound treatment) from free text clinical notes. First, two human annotators manually reviewed a purposeful training sample (n=360) and random test sample (n=1100) of clinical notes (including 50% discharge summaries and 50% outpatient notes), identified wound cases, and created a gold standard dataset. We then trained and tested our natural language processing system (known as MTERMS) to process the wound information. Finally, we assessed our automated approach by comparing system-generated findings against the gold standard. We also compared the prevalence of wound cases identified from free-text data with coded diagnoses in the structured data. The testing dataset included 101 notes (9.2%) with wound information. The overall system performance was good (F-measure is a compiled measure of system's accuracy=92.7%), with best results for wound treatment (F-measure=95.7%) and poorest results for wound size (F-measure=81.9%). Only 46.5% of wound notes had a structured code for a wound diagnosis. The natural language processing system achieved good performance on a subset of randomly selected discharge summaries and outpatient notes. In more than half of the wound notes, there were no coded wound diagnoses, which highlight the significance of using natural language processing to enrich clinical decision making. Our future steps will include expansion of the application's information coverage to other relevant wound factors and validation of the model with external data. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All

Dual Sticky Hierarchical Dirichlet Process Hidden Markov Model and Its Application to Natural Language Description of Motions.

Science.gov (United States)

Hu, Weiming; Tian, Guodong; Kang, Yongxin; Yuan, Chunfeng; Maybank, Stephen

2017-09-25

In this paper, a new nonparametric Bayesian model called the dual sticky hierarchical Dirichlet process hidden Markov model (HDP-HMM) is proposed for mining activities from a collection of time series data such as trajectories. All the time series data are clustered. Each cluster of time series data, corresponding to a motion pattern, is modeled by an HMM. Our model postulates a set of HMMs that share a common set of states (topics in an analogy with topic models for document processing), but have unique transition distributions. For the application to motion trajectory modeling, topics correspond to motion activities. The learnt topics are clustered into atomic activities which are assigned predicates. We propose a Bayesian inference method to decompose a given trajectory into a sequence of atomic activities. On combining the learnt sources and sinks, semantic motion regions, and the learnt sequence of atomic activities, the action represented by the trajectory can be described in natural language in as automatic a way as possible. The effectiveness of our dual sticky HDP-HMM is validated on several trajectory datasets. The effectiveness of the natural language descriptions for motions is demonstrated on the vehicle trajectories extracted from a traffic scene.

im4Things: An Ontology-Based Natural Language Interface for Controlling Devices in the Internet of Things

KAUST Repository

Noguera-Arnaldos, José Ángel

2017-03-14

The Internet of Things (IoT) offers opportunities for new applications and services that enable users to access and control their working and home environment from local and remote locations, aiming to perform daily life activities in an easy way. However, the IoT also introduces new challenges, some of which arise from the large range of devices currently available and the heterogeneous interfaces provided for their control. The control and management of this variety of devices and interfaces represent a new challenge for non-expert users, instead of making their life easier. Based on this understanding, in this work we present a natural language interface for the IoT, which takes advantage of Semantic Web technologies to allow non-expert users to control their home environment through an instant messaging application in an easy and intuitive way. We conducted several experiments with a group of end users aiming to evaluate the effectiveness of our approach to control home appliances by means of natural language instructions. The evaluation results proved that without the need for technicalities, the user was able to control the home appliances in an efficient way.

The Linguistic Interpretation for Language Union – Language Family

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

E.A. Balalykina

2016-10-01

Full Text Available The paper is dedicated to the problem of determination of the essence of language union and language family in modern linguistics, which is considered important, because these terms are often used as absolute synonyms. The research is relevant due to the need to distinguish the features of languages that are inherited during their functioning within either language union or language family when these languages are compared. The research has been carried out in order to present the historical background of the problem and to justify the need for differentiation of language facts that allow relating languages to particular language union or language family. In order to fulfill the goal of this work, descriptive, comparative, and historical methods have been used. A range of examples has been provided to prove that some languages, mainly Slavonic and Baltic languages, form a language family rather than a language union, because a whole number of features in their systems are the heritage of their common Indo-European past. Firstly, it is necessary to take into account changes having either common or different nature in the system of particular languages; secondly, one must have a precise idea of what features in the phonetic and morphological systems of compared languages allow to relate them to language union or language family; thirdly, it must be determined whether the changes in compared languages are regular or of any other type. On the basis of the obtained results, the following conclusions have been drawn: language union and language family are two different types of relations between modern languages; they allow identifying both degree of similarity of these languages and causes of differences between them. It is most important that one should distinguish and describe the specific features of two basic groups of languages forming language family or language union. The results obtained during the analysis are very important for linguistics

Sociolinguistic Typology and Sign Languages

OpenAIRE

Adam Schembri; Jordan Fenlon; Kearsy Cormier; Trevor Johnston

2018-01-01

This paper examines the possible relationship between proposed social determinants of morphological ‘complexity’ and how this contributes to linguistic diversity, specifically via the typological nature of the sign languages of deaf communities. We sketch how the notion of morphological complexity, as defined by Trudgill (2011), applies to sign languages. Using these criteria, sign languages appear to be languages with low to moderate levels of morphological complexity. This may partly reflec...

Knowledge acquisition from natural language for expert systems based on classification problem-solving methods

Science.gov (United States)

Gomez, Fernando

1989-01-01

It is shown how certain kinds of domain independent expert systems based on classification problem-solving methods can be constructed directly from natural language descriptions by a human expert. The expert knowledge is not translated into production rules. Rather, it is mapped into conceptual structures which are integrated into long-term memory (LTM). The resulting system is one in which problem-solving, retrieval and memory organization are integrated processes. In other words, the same algorithm and knowledge representation structures are shared by these processes. As a result of this, the system can answer questions, solve problems or reorganize LTM.

Music and language: musical alexia and agraphia.

Science.gov (United States)

Brust, J C

1980-06-01

Two aphasic right-handed professional musicians with left hemispheric lesions had disturbed musical function, especially musical alexia and agraphia. In Case 1 aphasia was of transcortical sensory type, with severe agraphia and decreased comprehension of written words, although she could match them with pictures. Except for reading and writing, musical ability was normal; she could sing in five languages. Musical alexia and agraphia affected pitch symbols more than rhythm. Case 2 had conduction aphasia and severe expressive amusia, especially for rhythm. Although his language alexia and agraphia were milder than Case 1's, his musical alexia and agraphia were more severe, affecting rhythm as much as pitch. In neither patient were those aspects of musical notation either closest to verbal language or most dependent upon temporal (sequential) processing maximally impaired. These cases are consistent with the literature in suggesting that the presence or absence of aphasia or of right or left hemispheric damage fails to predict the presence, type, or severity of amusia, including musical alexia and agraphia. The popular notion that receptive amusia follows lesions of the language-dominant temporal lobe, whereas expressive amusia follows non-dominant frontal lobe damage, is an over-simplification, as is the view that increasing musical sophistication causes a shift of musical processing from the right hemisphere to the left.

Voice-enabled Knowledge Engine using Flood Ontology and Natural Language Processing

Science.gov (United States)

Sermet, M. Y.; Demir, I.; Krajewski, W. F.

2015-12-01

The Iowa Flood Information System (IFIS) is a web-based platform developed by the Iowa Flood Center (IFC) to provide access to flood inundation maps, real-time flood conditions, flood forecasts, flood-related data, information and interactive visualizations for communities in Iowa. The IFIS is designed for use by general public, often people with no domain knowledge and limited general science background. To improve effective communication with such audience, we have introduced a voice-enabled knowledge engine on flood related issues in IFIS. Instead of navigating within many features and interfaces of the information system and web-based sources, the system provides dynamic computations based on a collection of built-in data, analysis, and methods. The IFIS Knowledge Engine connects to real-time stream gauges, in-house data sources, analysis and visualization tools to answer natural language questions. Our goal is the systematization of data and modeling results on flood related issues in Iowa, and to provide an interface for definitive answers to factual queries. The goal of the knowledge engine is to make all flood related knowledge in Iowa easily accessible to everyone, and support voice-enabled natural language input. We aim to integrate and curate all flood related data, implement analytical and visualization tools, and make it possible to compute answers from questions. The IFIS explicitly implements analytical methods and models, as algorithms, and curates all flood related data and resources so that all these resources are computable. The IFIS Knowledge Engine computes the answer by deriving it from its computational knowledge base. The knowledge engine processes the statement, access data warehouse, run complex database queries on the server-side and return outputs in various formats. This presentation provides an overview of IFIS Knowledge Engine, its unique information interface and functionality as an educational tool, and discusses the future plans

Towards multilingual access to textual databases in natural language

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Radwan, Khaled

1994-01-01

The Cross-Lingual Information Retrieval system (CLIR) or Multilingual Information Retrieval (MIR) has become the key issue in electronic documents management systems in a multinational environment. We propose here a multilingual information retrieval system consisting of a morpho-syntactic analyser, a transfer system from source language to target language and an information retrieval system. A thorough investigation into the system architecture and the transfer mechanisms is proposed in that report, using two different performance evaluation methods. (author) [fr

Language-Centered Social Studies: A Natural Integration.

Science.gov (United States)

Barrera, Rosalinda B.; Aleman, Magdalena

1983-01-01

Described is a newspaper project in which elementary students report life as it was in the Middle Ages. Students are involved in a variety of language-centered activities. For example, they gather and evaluate information about medieval times and write, edit, and proofread articles for the newspaper. (RM)

Biologically-inspired radar and sonar lessons from nature

CERN Document Server

Balleri, Alessio; Baker, Chris

2017-01-01

This book presents some of the recent work that has been carried out to investigate how sophisticated sensing techniques used in nature can be applied to radar and sonar systems to improve their performance.

Word-length algorithm for language identification of under-resourced languages

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Ali Selamat

2016-10-01

Full Text Available Language identification is widely used in machine learning, text mining, information retrieval, and speech processing. Available techniques for solving the problem of language identification do require large amount of training text that are not available for under-resourced languages which form the bulk of the World’s languages. The primary objective of this study is to propose a lexicon based algorithm which is able to perform language identification using minimal training data. Because language identification is often the first step in many natural language processing tasks, it is necessary to explore techniques that will perform language identification in the shortest possible time. Hence, the second objective of this research is to study the effect of the proposed algorithm on the run-time performance of language identification. Precision, recall, and F1 measures were used to determine the effectiveness of the proposed word length algorithm using datasets drawn from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Act in 15 languages. The experimental results show good accuracy on language identification at the document level and at the sentence level based on the available dataset. The improved algorithm also showed significant improvement in run time performance compared with the spelling checker approach.

Some Implications of Research in Second Language Acquisition for Foreign Language Teaching.

Science.gov (United States)

Lombardo, Linda

On the continuum along which theories of first and second language acquisition are located, the two extremes represent the classic controversy of nature (nativist) vs. nurture (environmentalist), while those in the middle view language acquisition as a result of a more or less balanced interaction between innate capacities and linguistic…

Surmounting the Tower of Babel: Monolingual and bilingual 2-year-olds' understanding of the nature of foreign language words.

Science.gov (United States)

Byers-Heinlein, Krista; Chen, Ke Heng; Xu, Fei

2014-03-01

Languages function as independent and distinct conventional systems, and so each language uses different words to label the same objects. This study investigated whether 2-year-old children recognize that speakers of their native language and speakers of a foreign language do not share the same knowledge. Two groups of children unfamiliar with Mandarin were tested: monolingual English-learning children (n=24) and bilingual children learning English and another language (n=24). An English speaker taught children the novel label fep. On English mutual exclusivity trials, the speaker asked for the referent of a novel label (wug) in the presence of the fep and a novel object. Both monolingual and bilingual children disambiguated the reference of the novel word using a mutual exclusivity strategy, choosing the novel object rather than the fep. On similar trials with a Mandarin speaker, children were asked to find the referent of a novel Mandarin label kuò. Monolinguals again chose the novel object rather than the object with the English label fep, even though the Mandarin speaker had no access to conventional English words. Bilinguals did not respond systematically to the Mandarin speaker, suggesting that they had enhanced understanding of the Mandarin speaker's ignorance of English words. The results indicate that monolingual children initially expect words to be conventionally shared across all speakers-native and foreign. Early bilingual experience facilitates children's discovery of the nature of foreign language words. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Short message service (SMS language and written language skills: educators' perspectives

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Salomé Geertsema

2011-01-01

Full Text Available SMS language is English language slang, used as a means of mobile phone text messaging. This practice may impact on the written language skills of learners at school. The main aim of this study was to determine the perspectives of Grade 8 and 9 English (as Home Language educators in Gauteng regarding the possible influence of SMS language on certain aspects of learners' written language skills. If an influence was perceived by the educators, their perceptions regarding the degree and nature of the influence were also explored. A quantitative research design, utilising a questionnaire, was employed. The sample of participants comprised 22 educators employed at independent secondaryschools within Gauteng, South Africa. The results indicated that the majority of educators viewed SMS language as having a negative influence on the written language skills of Grade 8 and 9 learners. The influence was perceived as occurring in the learners' spelling, punctuation, and sentence length. A further finding was that the majority of educators address the negative influences of SMS language when encountered in written tasks.

Early emerging system for reasoning about the social nature of food

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Liberman, Zoe; Woodward, Amanda L.; Sullivan, Kathleen R.; Kinzler, Katherine D.

2016-01-01

Selecting appropriate foods is a complex and evolutionarily ancient problem, yet past studies have revealed little evidence of adaptations present in infancy that support sophisticated reasoning about perceptual properties of food. We propose that humans have an early-emerging system for reasoning about the social nature of food selection. Specifically, infants’ reasoning about food choice is tied to their thinking about agents’ intentions and social relationships. Whereas infants do not expect people to like the same objects, infants view food preferences as meaningfully shared across individuals. Infants’ reasoning about food preferences is fundamentally social: They generalize food preferences across individuals who affiliate, or who speak a common language, but not across individuals who socially disengage or who speak different languages. Importantly, infants’ reasoning about food preferences is flexibly calibrated to their own experiences: Tests of bilingual babies reveal that an infant’s sociolinguistic background influences whether she will constrain her generalization of food preferences to people who speak the same language. Additionally, infants’ systems for reasoning about food is differentially responsive to positive and negative information. Infants generalize information about food disgust across all people, regardless of those people’s social identities. Thus, whereas food preferences are seen as embedded within social groups, disgust is interpreted as socially universal, which could help infants avoid potentially dangerous foods. These studies reveal an early-emerging system for thinking about food that incorporates social reasoning about agents and their relationships, and allows infants to make abstract, flexible, adaptive inferences to interpret others’ food choices. PMID:27503878

Early emerging system for reasoning about the social nature of food.

Science.gov (United States)

Liberman, Zoe; Woodward, Amanda L; Sullivan, Kathleen R; Kinzler, Katherine D

2016-08-23

Selecting appropriate foods is a complex and evolutionarily ancient problem, yet past studies have revealed little evidence of adaptations present in infancy that support sophisticated reasoning about perceptual properties of food. We propose that humans have an early-emerging system for reasoning about the social nature of food selection. Specifically, infants' reasoning about food choice is tied to their thinking about agents' intentions and social relationships. Whereas infants do not expect people to like the same objects, infants view food preferences as meaningfully shared across individuals. Infants' reasoning about food preferences is fundamentally social: They generalize food preferences across individuals who affiliate, or who speak a common language, but not across individuals who socially disengage or who speak different languages. Importantly, infants' reasoning about food preferences is flexibly calibrated to their own experiences: Tests of bilingual babies reveal that an infant's sociolinguistic background influences whether she will constrain her generalization of food preferences to people who speak the same language. Additionally, infants' systems for reasoning about food is differentially responsive to positive and negative information. Infants generalize information about food disgust across all people, regardless of those people's social identities. Thus, whereas food preferences are seen as embedded within social groups, disgust is interpreted as socially universal, which could help infants avoid potentially dangerous foods. These studies reveal an early-emerging system for thinking about food that incorporates social reasoning about agents and their relationships, and allows infants to make abstract, flexible, adaptive inferences to interpret others' food choices.

Crowdsourcing and curation: perspectives from biology and natural language processing.

Science.gov (United States)

Hirschman, Lynette; Fort, Karën; Boué, Stéphanie; Kyrpides, Nikos; Islamaj Doğan, Rezarta; Cohen, Kevin Bretonnel

2016-01-01

Crowdsourcing is increasingly utilized for performing tasks in both natural language processing and biocuration. Although there have been many applications of crowdsourcing in these fields, there have been fewer high-level discussions of the methodology and its applicability to biocuration. This paper explores crowdsourcing for biocuration through several case studies that highlight different ways of leveraging 'the crowd'; these raise issues about the kind(s) of expertise needed, the motivations of participants, and questions related to feasibility, cost and quality. The paper is an outgrowth of a panel session held at BioCreative V (Seville, September 9-11, 2015). The session consisted of four short talks, followed by a discussion. In their talks, the panelists explored the role of expertise and the potential to improve crowd performance by training; the challenge of decomposing tasks to make them amenable to crowdsourcing; and the capture of biological data and metadata through community editing.Database URL: http://www.mitre.org/publications/technical-papers/crowdsourcing-and-curation-perspectives. © The Author(s) 2016. Published by Oxford University Press.

Document Categorization with Modified Statistical Language Models for Agglutinative Languages

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Tantug

2010-11-01

Full Text Available In this paper, we investigate the document categorization task with statistical language models. Our study mainly focuses on categorization of documents in agglutinative languages. Due to the productive morphology of agglutinative languages, the number of word forms encountered in naturally occurring text is very large. From the language modeling perspective, a large vocabulary results in serious data sparseness problems. In order to cope with this drawback, previous studies in various application areas suggest modified language models based on different morphological units. It is reported that performance improvements can be achieved with these modified language models. In our document categorization experiments, we use standard word form based language models as well as other modified language models based on root words, root words and part-of-speech information, truncated word forms and character sequences. Additionally, to find an optimum parameter set, multiple tests are carried out with different language model orders and smoothing methods. Similar to previous studies on other tasks, our experimental results on categorization of Turkish documents reveal that applying linguistic preprocessing steps for language modeling provides improvements over standard language models to some extent. However, it is also observed that similar level of performance improvements can also be acquired by simpler character level or truncated word form models which are language independent.

THE USE OF 2ND LIFE IN LANGUAGE TEACHING

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Saziye YAMAN

2011-08-01

Full Text Available Approaches and methods are often based on the assumptions that the process of language learning is complex in nature, non linear, and active. Learners are getting more in need of communication with a second/foreign language both inside and outside the classroom while instructions are witnessing a major paradigm shift within language teaching in our century. Virtual worlds have the potential to dramatically change the traditional nature of language teaching through 3D spaces, information and communication technologies, etc… Second Life (SL Virtual World, as supplementing language instruction, has begun to shape both teachers and learners’ interaction with language. Learners are facilitated with 3D spaces in their own reality and environment, allowing them to interpret and apply a variety of experiences and tasks. SL offers rich sources and dimensions, facilitating the changing nature of learning experience.

Reacting to Neighborhood Cues?: Political Sophistication Moderates the Effect of Exposure to Immigrants

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Danckert, Bolette; Dinesen, Peter Thisted; Sønderskov, Kim Mannemar

2017-01-01

is founded on politically sophisticated individuals having a greater comprehension of news and other mass-mediated sources, which makes them less likely to rely on neighborhood cues as sources of information relevant for political attitudes. Based on a unique panel data set with fine-grained information...

Understanding Student Language: An Unsupervised Dialogue Act Classification Approach

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Ezen-Can, Aysu; Boyer, Kristy Elizabeth

2015-01-01

Within the landscape of educational data, textual natural language is an increasingly vast source of learning-centered interactions. In natural language dialogue, student contributions hold important information about knowledge and goals. Automatically modeling the dialogue act of these student utterances is crucial for scaling natural language…

Bilingual Language Switching in the Laboratory versus in the Wild: The Spatiotemporal Dynamics of Adaptive Language Control.

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Blanco-Elorrieta, Esti; Pylkkänen, Liina

2017-09-13

For a bilingual human, every utterance requires a choice about which language to use. This choice is commonly regarded as part of general executive control, engaging prefrontal and anterior cingulate cortices similarly to many types of effortful task switching. However, although language control within artificial switching paradigms has been heavily studied, the neurobiology of natural switching within socially cued situations has not been characterized. Additionally, although theoretical models address how language control mechanisms adapt to the distinct demands of different interactional contexts, these predictions have not been empirically tested. We used MEG (RRID: NIFINV:nlx_inv_090918) to investigate language switching in multiple contexts ranging from completely artificial to the comprehension of a fully natural bilingual conversation recorded "in the wild." Our results showed less anterior cingulate and prefrontal cortex involvement for more natural switching. In production, voluntary switching did not engage the prefrontal cortex or elicit behavioral switch costs. In comprehension, while laboratory switches recruited executive control areas, fully natural switching within a conversation only engaged auditory cortices. Multivariate pattern analyses revealed that, in production, interlocutor identity was represented in a sustained fashion throughout the different stages of language planning until speech onset. In comprehension, however, a biphasic pattern was observed: interlocutor identity was first represented at the presentation of the interlocutor and then again at the presentation of the auditory word. In all, our findings underscore the importance of ecologically valid experimental paradigms and offer the first neurophysiological characterization of language control in a range of situations simulating real life to various degrees. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Bilingualism is an inherently social phenomenon, interactional context fully determining language

Treating conduct disorder: An effectiveness and natural language analysis study of a new family-centred intervention program.

Science.gov (United States)

Stevens, Kimberly A; Ronan, Prof Kevin; Davies, Gene

2017-05-01

This paper reports on a new family-centred, feedback-informed intervention focused on evaluating therapeutic outcomes and language changes across treatment for conduct disorder (CD). The study included 26 youth and families from a larger randomised, controlled trial (Ronan et al., in preparation). Outcome measures reflected family functioning/youth compliance, delinquency, and family goal attainment. First- and last-treatment session audio files were transcribed into more than 286,000 words and evaluated through the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count Analysis program (Pennebaker et al., 2007). Significant outcomes across family functioning/youth compliance, delinquency, goal attainment and word usage reflected moderate-strong effect sizes. Benchmarking findings also revealed reduced time of treatment delivery compared to a gold standard approach. Linguistic analysis revealed specific language changes across treatment. For caregivers, increased first person, action-oriented, present tense, and assent type words and decreased sadness words were found; for youth, significant reduction in use of leisure words. This study is the first using lexical analyses of natural language to assess change across treatment for conduct disordered youth and families. Such findings provided strong support for program tenets; others, more speculative support. Copyright © 2016. Published by Elsevier B.V.

A natural language-based presentation of cognitive stimulation to people with dementia in assistive technology: A pilot study.

Science.gov (United States)

Dethlefs, Nina; Milders, Maarten; Cuayáhuitl, Heriberto; Al-Salkini, Turkey; Douglas, Lorraine

2017-12-01

Currently, an estimated 36 million people worldwide are affected by Alzheimer's disease or related dementias. In the absence of a cure, non-pharmacological interventions, such as cognitive stimulation, which slow down the rate of deterioration can benefit people with dementia and their caregivers. Such interventions have shown to improve well-being and slow down the rate of cognitive decline. It has further been shown that cognitive stimulation in interaction with a computer is as effective as with a human. However, the need to operate a computer often represents a difficulty for the elderly and stands in the way of widespread adoption. A possible solution to this obstacle is to provide a spoken natural language interface that allows people with dementia to interact with the cognitive stimulation software in the same way as they would interact with a human caregiver. This makes the assistive technology accessible to users regardless of their technical skills and provides a fully intuitive user experience. This article describes a pilot study that evaluated the feasibility of computer-based cognitive stimulation through a spoken natural language interface. Prototype software was evaluated with 23 users, including healthy elderly people and people with dementia. Feedback was overwhelmingly positive.

Identification of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus within the Nation’s Veterans Affairs Medical Centers using natural language processing

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Jones Makoto

2012-07-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background Accurate information is needed to direct healthcare systems’ efforts to control methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA. Assembling complete and correct microbiology data is vital to understanding and addressing the multiple drug-resistant organisms in our hospitals. Methods Herein, we describe a system that securely gathers microbiology data from the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA network of databases. Using natural language processing methods, we applied an information extraction process to extract organisms and susceptibilities from the free-text data. We then validated the extraction against independently derived electronic data and expert annotation. Results We estimate that the collected microbiology data are 98.5% complete and that methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus was extracted accurately 99.7% of the time. Conclusions Applying natural language processing methods to microbiology records appears to be a promising way to extract accurate and useful nosocomial pathogen surveillance data. Both scientific inquiry and the data’s reliability will be dependent on the surveillance system’s capability to compare from multiple sources and circumvent systematic error. The dataset constructed and methods used for this investigation could contribute to a comprehensive infectious disease surveillance system or other pressing needs.

Natural Language Processing in Serious Games: A state of the art.

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Davide Picca

2015-09-01

Full Text Available In the last decades, Natural Language Processing (NLP has obtained a high level of success. Interactions between NLP and Serious Games have started and some of them already include NLP techniques. The objectives of this paper are twofold: on the one hand, providing a simple framework to enable analysis of potential uses of NLP in Serious Games and, on the other hand, applying the NLP framework to existing Serious Games and giving an overview of the use of NLP in pedagogical Serious Games. In this paper we present 11 serious games exploiting NLP techniques. We present them systematically, according to the following structure:  first, we highlight possible uses of NLP techniques in Serious Games, second, we describe the type of NLP implemented in the each specific Serious Game and, third, we provide a link to possible purposes of use for the different actors interacting in the Serious Game.

A common type system for clinical natural language processing.

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Wu, Stephen T; Kaggal, Vinod C; Dligach, Dmitriy; Masanz, James J; Chen, Pei; Becker, Lee; Chapman, Wendy W; Savova, Guergana K; Liu, Hongfang; Chute, Christopher G

2013-01-03

One challenge in reusing clinical data stored in electronic medical records is that these data are heterogenous. Clinical Natural Language Processing (NLP) plays an important role in transforming information in clinical text to a standard representation that is comparable and interoperable. Information may be processed and shared when a type system specifies the allowable data structures. Therefore, we aim to define a common type system for clinical NLP that enables interoperability between structured and unstructured data generated in different clinical settings. We describe a common type system for clinical NLP that has an end target of deep semantics based on Clinical Element Models (CEMs), thus interoperating with structured data and accommodating diverse NLP approaches. The type system has been implemented in UIMA (Unstructured Information Management Architecture) and is fully functional in a popular open-source clinical NLP system, cTAKES (clinical Text Analysis and Knowledge Extraction System) versions 2.0 and later. We have created a type system that targets deep semantics, thereby allowing for NLP systems to encapsulate knowledge from text and share it alongside heterogenous clinical data sources. Rather than surface semantics that are typically the end product of NLP algorithms, CEM-based semantics explicitly build in deep clinical semantics as the point of interoperability with more structured data types.

Language Technologies for Lifelong Learning

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Greller, Wolfgang

2011-01-01

Greller, W. (2010). Language Technologies for Lifelong Learning. In S. Trausan-Matu & P. Dessus (Eds.), Proceedings of the Natural Language Processing in Support of Learning: Metrics, Feedback and Connectivity. Second Internationl Workshop - NLPSL 2010 (pp. 6-8). September, 14, 2010, Bucharest,

Static Analysis of Dynamic Languages

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Madsen, Magnus

Dynamic programming languages are highly popular and widely used. Java- Script is often called the lingua franca of the web and it is the de facto standard for client-side web programming. On the server-side the PHP, Python and Ruby languages are prevalent. What these languages have in common...... with static type systems, such as Java and C# , but the same features are rarely available for dynamic languages such as JavaScript. The aim of this thesis is to investigate techniques for improving the tool- support for dynamic programming languages without imposing any artificial restrictions...... of new dataflow analysis techniques to tackle the nature of dynamic programming languages....

Of Substance: The Nature of Language Effects on Entity Construal

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Li, Peggy; Dunham, Yarrow; Carey, Susan

2009-01-01

Shown an entity (e.g., a plastic whisk) labeled by a novel noun in neutral syntax, speakers of Japanese, a classifier language, are more likely to assume the noun refers to the substance (plastic) than are speakers of English, a count/mass language, who are instead more likely to assume it refers to the object kind [whisk; Imai, M., & Gentner, D.…

Unpacking Big Systems -- Natural Language Processing Meets Network Analysis. A Study of Smart Grid Development in Denmark

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Jurowetzki, Roman

and contained technological trajectories on a national level using a combination of methods from statistical natural language processing, vector space modelling and network analysis. The proposed approach does not aim at replacing the researcher or expert but rather offers the possibility to algorithmically...... in Denmark. Results show that in the explored case it is not mainly new technologies and applications that are driving change but innovative re-combinations of old and new technologies....

Financial Sophistication and the Distribution of the Welfare Cost of Inflation

OpenAIRE

Paola Boel; Gabriele Camera

2009-01-01

The welfare cost of anticipated inflation is quantified in a calibrated model of the U.S. economy that exhibits tractable equilibrium dispersion in wealth and earnings. Inflation does not generate large losses in societal welfare, yet its impact varies noticeably across segments of society depending also on the financial sophistication of the economy. If money is the only asset, then inflation hurts mostly the wealthier and more productive agents, while those poorer and less productive may ev...

DALILA: The Dialectal Arabic Linguistic Learning Assistant

OpenAIRE

Khalifa , Salam; Bouamor , Houda; Habash , Nizar

2016-01-01

International audience; Dialectal Arabic (DA) poses serious challenges for Natural Language Processing (NLP). The number and sophistication of tools and datasets in DA are very limited in comparison to Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and other languages. MSA tools do not effectively model DA which makes the direct use of MSA NLP tools for handling dialects impractical. This is particularly a challenge for the creation of tools to support learning Arabic as a living language on the web, where aut...

Language learning, language use and the evolution of linguistic variation

Science.gov (United States)

Perfors, Amy; Fehér, Olga; Samara, Anna; Swoboda, Kate; Wonnacott, Elizabeth

2017-01-01

Linguistic universals arise from the interaction between the processes of language learning and language use. A test case for the relationship between these factors is linguistic variation, which tends to be conditioned on linguistic or sociolinguistic criteria. How can we explain the scarcity of unpredictable variation in natural language, and to what extent is this property of language a straightforward reflection of biases in statistical learning? We review three strands of experimental work exploring these questions, and introduce a Bayesian model of the learning and transmission of linguistic variation along with a closely matched artificial language learning experiment with adult participants. Our results show that while the biases of language learners can potentially play a role in shaping linguistic systems, the relationship between biases of learners and the structure of languages is not straightforward. Weak biases can have strong effects on language structure as they accumulate over repeated transmission. But the opposite can also be true: strong biases can have weak or no effects. Furthermore, the use of language during interaction can reshape linguistic systems. Combining data and insights from studies of learning, transmission and use is therefore essential if we are to understand how biases in statistical learning interact with language transmission and language use to shape the structural properties of language. This article is part of the themed issue ‘New frontiers for statistical learning in the cognitive sciences’. PMID:27872370

Language learning, language use and the evolution of linguistic variation.

Science.gov (United States)

Smith, Kenny; Perfors, Amy; Fehér, Olga; Samara, Anna; Swoboda, Kate; Wonnacott, Elizabeth

2017-01-05

Linguistic universals arise from the interaction between the processes of language learning and language use. A test case for the relationship between these factors is linguistic variation, which tends to be conditioned on linguistic or sociolinguistic criteria. How can we explain the scarcity of unpredictable variation in natural language, and to what extent is this property of language a straightforward reflection of biases in statistical learning? We review three strands of experimental work exploring these questions, and introduce a Bayesian model of the learning and transmission of linguistic variation along with a closely matched artificial language learning experiment with adult participants. Our results show that while the biases of language learners can potentially play a role in shaping linguistic systems, the relationship between biases of learners and the structure of languages is not straightforward. Weak biases can have strong effects on language structure as they accumulate over repeated transmission. But the opposite can also be true: strong biases can have weak or no effects. Furthermore, the use of language during interaction can reshape linguistic systems. Combining data and insights from studies of learning, transmission and use is therefore essential if we are to understand how biases in statistical learning interact with language transmission and language use to shape the structural properties of language.This article is part of the themed issue 'New frontiers for statistical learning in the cognitive sciences'. © 2016 The Authors.

Progress on nature and nurture: Commentary on Granqvist and Nkara's 'Nature meets nurture in religious and spiritual development'.

Science.gov (United States)

Boyatzis, Chris J

2017-03-01

This commentary addresses several key ideas in the Granqvist and Nkara (this issue) conceptual piece on the need for a more sophisticated understanding of how nature and nurture interact to influence religious and spiritual development. Cultural and genetic factors are explored. © 2017 The British Psychological Society.

The English Language and Communicability: The Nigerian ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

Nigeria is blessed with many indigenous languages that are mainly used in communication, including English as her second language. These languages had never remained static; they develop simultaneously with the developing nature of Nigeria. Communication therefore dominates the various functions performed by ...

How to do language policy with dictionaries

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Bergenholtz, Henning

2006-01-01

participate in the implementation of language policy. It is indicated that lexicographers make ever so many decisions of a language political nature. In this regard the lexicographic influence of issues like linguistic hegemony and language purism are discussed. Suggestions are also made...

The Natural History of Human Language: Bridging the Gaps without Magic

Science.gov (United States)

Merker, Bjorn; Okanoya, Kazuo

Human languages are quintessentially historical phenomena. Every known aspect of linguistic form and content is subject to change in historical time (Lehmann, 1995; Bybee, 2004). Many facts of language, syntactic no less than semantic, find their explanation in the historical processes that generated them. If adpositions were once verbs, then the fact that they tend to occur on the same side of their arguments as do verbs ("cross-category harmony": Hawkins, 1983) is a matter of historical contingency rather than a reflection of inherent structural constraints on human language (Delancey, 1993).

The relationship between mathematics and language: academic implications for children with specific language impairment and English language learners.

Science.gov (United States)

Alt, Mary; Arizmendi, Genesis D; Beal, Carole R

2014-07-01

The present study examined the relationship between mathematics and language to better understand the nature of the deficit and the academic implications associated with specific language impairment (SLI) and academic implications for English language learners (ELLs). School-age children (N = 61; 20 SLI, 20 ELL, 21 native monolingual English [NE]) were assessed using a norm-referenced mathematics instrument and 3 experimental computer-based mathematics games that varied in language demands. Group means were compared with analyses of variance. The ELL group was less accurate than the NE group only when tasks were language heavy. In contrast, the group with SLI was less accurate than the groups with NE and ELLs on language-heavy tasks and some language-light tasks. Specifically, the group with SLI was less accurate on tasks that involved comparing numerical symbols and using visual working memory for patterns. However, there were no group differences between children with SLI and peers without SLI on language-light mathematics tasks that involved visual working memory for numerical symbols. Mathematical difficulties of children who are ELLs appear to be related to the language demands of mathematics tasks. In contrast, children with SLI appear to have difficulty with mathematics tasks because of linguistic as well as nonlinguistic processing constraints.

ACOUSTIC SPEECH RECOGNITION FOR MARATHI LANGUAGE USING SPHINX

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Aman Ankit

2016-09-01

Full Text Available Speech recognition or speech to text processing, is a process of recognizing human speech by the computer and converting into text. In speech recognition, transcripts are created by taking recordings of speech as audio and their text transcriptions. Speech based applications which include Natural Language Processing (NLP techniques are popular and an active area of research. Input to such applications is in natural language and output is obtained in natural language. Speech recognition mostly revolves around three approaches namely Acoustic phonetic approach, Pattern recognition approach and Artificial intelligence approach. Creation of acoustic model requires a large database of speech and training algorithms. The output of an ASR system is recognition and translation of spoken language into text by computers and computerized devices. ASR today finds enormous application in tasks that require human machine interfaces like, voice dialing, and etc. Our key contribution in this paper is to create corpora for Marathi language and explore the use of Sphinx engine for automatic speech recognition

Putin’s Russia: Russian Mentality and Sophisticated Imperialism in Military Policies

OpenAIRE

Szénási, Lieutenant-Colonel Endre

2016-01-01

According to my experiences, the Western world hopelessly fails to understand Russian mentality, or misinterprets it. During my analysis of the Russian way of thinking I devoted special attention to the examination of military mentality. I have connected the issue of the Russian way of thinking to the contemporary imperial policies of Putin’s Russia.  I have also attempted to prove the level of sophistication of both. I hope that a better understanding of both the Russian mentality and imperi...

The Loch Ness Monster approach to bilingual language lateralization: a response to Berquier and Ashton.

Science.gov (United States)

Paradis, M

1992-10-01

To continue to search for a difference in language lateralization between bilinguals and unilinguals is at best a futile task in the face of all the clinical evidence to the contrary and inconsistent experimental findings. No amount of refining of dichotic, tachistoscopic, or concurrent task procedures, or statistical sophistication, is likely to tap the differential reliance on pragmatic cues that might very well exist in some nonbalanced bilinguals.

The IDEAL (Integrated Design and Engineering Analysis Languages) modeling methodology: Capabilities and Applications

Science.gov (United States)

Evers, Ken H.; Bachert, Robert F.

1987-01-01

The IDEAL (Integrated Design and Engineering Analysis Languages) modeling methodology has been formulated and applied over a five-year period. It has proven to be a unique, integrated approach utilizing a top-down, structured technique to define and document the system of interest; a knowledge engineering technique to collect and organize system descriptive information; a rapid prototyping technique to perform preliminary system performance analysis; and a sophisticated simulation technique to perform in-depth system performance analysis.

The influence of the visual modality on language structure and conventionalization: insights from sign language and gesture.

Science.gov (United States)

Perniss, Pamela; Özyürek, Asli; Morgan, Gary

2015-01-01

For humans, the ability to communicate and use language is instantiated not only in the vocal modality but also in the visual modality. The main examples of this are sign languages and (co-speech) gestures. Sign languages, the natural languages of Deaf communities, use systematic and conventionalized movements of the hands, face, and body for linguistic expression. Co-speech gestures, though non-linguistic, are produced in tight semantic and temporal integration with speech and constitute an integral part of language together with speech. The articles in this issue explore and document how gestures and sign languages are similar or different and how communicative expression in the visual modality can change from being gestural to grammatical in nature through processes of conventionalization. As such, this issue contributes to our understanding of how the visual modality shapes language and the emergence of linguistic structure in newly developing systems. Studying the relationship between signs and gestures provides a new window onto the human ability to recruit multiple levels of representation (e.g., categorical, gradient, iconic, abstract) in the service of using or creating conventionalized communicative systems. Copyright © 2015 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.

Building an ontology of pulmonary diseases with natural language processing tools using textual corpora.

Science.gov (United States)

Baneyx, Audrey; Charlet, Jean; Jaulent, Marie-Christine

2007-01-01

Pathologies and acts are classified in thesauri to help physicians to code their activity. In practice, the use of thesauri is not sufficient to reduce variability in coding and thesauri are not suitable for computer processing. We think the automation of the coding task requires a conceptual modeling of medical items: an ontology. Our task is to help lung specialists code acts and diagnoses with software that represents medical knowledge of this concerned specialty by an ontology. The objective of the reported work was to build an ontology of pulmonary diseases dedicated to the coding process. To carry out this objective, we develop a precise methodological process for the knowledge engineer in order to build various types of medical ontologies. This process is based on the need to express precisely in natural language the meaning of each concept using differential semantics principles. A differential ontology is a hierarchy of concepts and relationships organized according to their similarities and differences. Our main research hypothesis is to apply natural language processing tools to corpora to develop the resources needed to build the ontology. We consider two corpora, one composed of patient discharge summaries and the other being a teaching book. We propose to combine two approaches to enrich the ontology building: (i) a method which consists of building terminological resources through distributional analysis and (ii) a method based on the observation of corpus sequences in order to reveal semantic relationships. Our ontology currently includes 1550 concepts and the software implementing the coding process is still under development. Results show that the proposed approach is operational and indicates that the combination of these methods and the comparison of the resulting terminological structures give interesting clues to a knowledge engineer for the building of an ontology.

Assessment Measures for Specific Contexts of Language Use.

Science.gov (United States)

Chalhoub-Deville, Micheline; Tarone, Elaine

A discussion of second language testing focuses on the need for collaboration among researchers in second language learning, teaching, and testing concerning development of context-appropriate language tests. It is argued that the nature of the proficiency construct in language is not constant, but that different linguistic, functional, and…

From Imitation to Prediction, Data Compression vs Recurrent Neural Networks for Natural Language Processing

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Juan Andres Laura

2018-03-01

Full Text Available In recent studies Recurrent Neural Networks were used for generative processes and their surprising performance can be explained by their ability to create good predictions. In addition, Data Compression is also based on prediction. What the problem comes down to is whether a data compressor could be used to perform as well as recurrent neural networks in the natural language processing tasks of sentiment analysis and automatic text generation. If this is possible, then the problem comes down to determining if a compression algorithm is even more intelligent than a neural network in such tasks. In our journey, a fundamental difference between a Data Compression Algorithm and Recurrent Neural Networks has been discovered.

Creation of a simple natural language processing tool to support an imaging utilization quality dashboard.

Science.gov (United States)

Swartz, Jordan; Koziatek, Christian; Theobald, Jason; Smith, Silas; Iturrate, Eduardo

2017-05-01

Testing for venous thromboembolism (VTE) is associated with cost and risk to patients (e.g. radiation). To assess the appropriateness of imaging utilization at the provider level, it is important to know that provider's diagnostic yield (percentage of tests positive for the diagnostic entity of interest). However, determining diagnostic yield typically requires either time-consuming, manual review of radiology reports or the use of complex and/or proprietary natural language processing software. The objectives of this study were twofold: 1) to develop and implement a simple, user-configurable, and open-source natural language processing tool to classify radiology reports with high accuracy and 2) to use the results of the tool to design a provider-specific VTE imaging dashboard, consisting of both utilization rate and diagnostic yield. Two physicians reviewed a training set of 400 lower extremity ultrasound (UTZ) and computed tomography pulmonary angiogram (CTPA) reports to understand the language used in VTE-positive and VTE-negative reports. The insights from this review informed the arguments to the five modifiable parameters of the NLP tool. A validation set of 2,000 studies was then independently classified by the reviewers and by the tool; the classifications were compared and the performance of the tool was calculated. The tool was highly accurate in classifying the presence and absence of VTE for both the UTZ (sensitivity 95.7%; 95% CI 91.5-99.8, specificity 100%; 95% CI 100-100) and CTPA reports (sensitivity 97.1%; 95% CI 94.3-99.9, specificity 98.6%; 95% CI 97.8-99.4). The diagnostic yield was then calculated at the individual provider level and the imaging dashboard was created. We have created a novel NLP tool designed for users without a background in computer programming, which has been used to classify venous thromboembolism reports with a high degree of accuracy. The tool is open-source and available for download at http

The relation between maturity and sophistication shall be properly dealt with in nuclear power development

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Li Yongjiang

2009-01-01

The paper analyses the advantages and disadvantages of the second generation improved technologies and third generation technologies mainly developed in China in terms of safety and economy. The paper also discusses the maturity of the second generation improved technologies and the sophistication of the third generation technologies respectively. Meanwhile, the paper proposes that the advantage and disadvantage of second generation improved technologies and third generation technologies should be carefully taken into consideration and the relationship between the maturity and sophistication should be properly dealt with in the current stage. A two-step strategy shall be taken as a solution to solve the problem of insufficient capacity of nuclear power, trace and develop the third generation technologies, so as to ensure the sound and fast development of nuclear power. (authors)

Through the Window of Language: Assessing the Influence of Language Diversity on Thought

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John A. LUCY

2010-01-01

Full Text Available Historically, researchers divided over whether the diverse representations of reality across languages were natural or conventional, but all tacitly assumed an optimal fit between language and reality. Twentieth century anthropological linguists interested in linguistic relativity have questioned this assumption and sought to characterize "reality" without it by using domain- or structure-centered approaches.

How the strengths of Lisp-family languages facilitate building complex and flexible bioinformatics applications.

Science.gov (United States)

Khomtchouk, Bohdan B; Weitz, Edmund; Karp, Peter D; Wahlestedt, Claes

2016-12-31

We present a rationale for expanding the presence of the Lisp family of programming languages in bioinformatics and computational biology research. Put simply, Lisp-family languages enable programmers to more quickly write programs that run faster than in other languages. Languages such as Common Lisp, Scheme and Clojure facilitate the creation of powerful and flexible software that is required for complex and rapidly evolving domains like biology. We will point out several important key features that distinguish languages of the Lisp family from other programming languages, and we will explain how these features can aid researchers in becoming more productive and creating better code. We will also show how these features make these languages ideal tools for artificial intelligence and machine learning applications. We will specifically stress the advantages of domain-specific languages (DSLs): languages that are specialized to a particular area, and thus not only facilitate easier research problem formulation, but also aid in the establishment of standards and best programming practices as applied to the specific research field at hand. DSLs are particularly easy to build in Common Lisp, the most comprehensive Lisp dialect, which is commonly referred to as the 'programmable programming language'. We are convinced that Lisp grants programmers unprecedented power to build increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence systems that may ultimately transform machine learning and artificial intelligence research in bioinformatics and computational biology. © The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press.

The Relationship between Artificial and Second Language Learning

Science.gov (United States)

Ettlinger, Marc; Morgan-Short, Kara; Faretta-Stutenberg, Mandy; Wong, Patrick C. M.

2016-01-01

Artificial language learning (ALL) experiments have become an important tool in exploring principles of language and language learning. A persistent question in all of this work, however, is whether ALL engages the linguistic system and whether ALL studies are ecologically valid assessments of natural language ability. In the present study, we…

INTEGRATING CORPUS-BASED RESOURCES AND NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING TOOLS INTO CALL

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Pascual Cantos Gomez

2002-06-01

Full Text Available This paper ainis at presenting a survey of computational linguistic tools presently available but whose potential has been neither fully considered not exploited to its full in modern CALL. It starts with a discussion on the rationale of DDL to language learning, presenting typical DDL-activities. DDL-software and potential extensions of non-typical DDL-software (electronic dictionaries and electronic dictionary facilities to DDL . An extended section is devoted to describe NLP-technology and how it can be integrated into CALL, within already existing software or as stand alone resources. A range of NLP-tools is presentcd (MT programs, taggers, lemn~atizersp, arsers and speech technologies with special emphasis on tagged concordancing. The paper finishes with a number of reflections and ideas on how language technologies can be used efficiently within the language learning context and how extensive exploration and integration of these technologies might change and extend both modern CAI,I, and the present language learning paradigiii..

On application of image analysis and natural language processing for music search

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Gwardys, Grzegorz

2013-10-01

In this paper, I investigate a problem of finding most similar music tracks using, popular in Natural Language Processing, techniques like: TF-IDF and LDA. I de ned document as music track. Each music track is transformed to spectrogram, thanks that, I can use well known techniques to get words from images. I used SURF operation to detect characteristic points and novel approach for their description. The standard kmeans was used for clusterization. Clusterization is here identical with dictionary making, so after that I can transform spectrograms to text documents and perform TF-IDF and LDA. At the final, I can make a query in an obtained vector space. The research was done on 16 music tracks for training and 336 for testing, that are splitted in four categories: Hiphop, Jazz, Metal and Pop. Although used technique is completely unsupervised, results are satisfactory and encouraging to further research.

Mirror neurons, language, and embodied cognition.

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Perlovsky, Leonid I; Ilin, Roman

2013-05-01

Basic mechanisms of the mind, cognition, language, its semantic and emotional mechanisms are modeled using dynamic logic (DL). This cognitively and mathematically motivated model leads to a dual-model hypothesis of language and cognition. The paper emphasizes that abstract cognition cannot evolve without language. The developed model is consistent with a joint emergence of language and cognition from a mirror neuron system. The dual language-cognition model leads to the dual mental hierarchy. The nature of cognition embodiment in the hierarchy is analyzed. Future theoretical and experimental research is discussed. Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) Software: Evaluation ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

Evaluating the nature and extent of the influence of Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) on the quality of language learning is highly problematic. This is owing to the number and complexity of interacting variables involved in setting the items for teaching and learning languages. This paper identified and ...

Database Capture of Natural Language Echocardiographic Reports: A Unified Medical Language System Approach

OpenAIRE

Canfield, K.; Bray, B.; Huff, S.; Warner, H.

1989-01-01

We describe a prototype system for semi-automatic database capture of free-text echocardiography reports. The system is very simple and uses a Unified Medical Language System compatible architecture. We use this system and a large body of texts to create a patient database and develop a comprehensive hierarchical dictionary for echocardiography.

A common type system for clinical natural language processing

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Wu Stephen T

2013-01-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background One challenge in reusing clinical data stored in electronic medical records is that these data are heterogenous. Clinical Natural Language Processing (NLP plays an important role in transforming information in clinical text to a standard representation that is comparable and interoperable. Information may be processed and shared when a type system specifies the allowable data structures. Therefore, we aim to define a common type system for clinical NLP that enables interoperability between structured and unstructured data generated in different clinical settings. Results We describe a common type system for clinical NLP that has an end target of deep semantics based on Clinical Element Models (CEMs, thus interoperating with structured data and accommodating diverse NLP approaches. The type system has been implemented in UIMA (Unstructured Information Management Architecture and is fully functional in a popular open-source clinical NLP system, cTAKES (clinical Text Analysis and Knowledge Extraction System versions 2.0 and later. Conclusions We have created a type system that targets deep semantics, thereby allowing for NLP systems to encapsulate knowledge from text and share it alongside heterogenous clinical data sources. Rather than surface semantics that are typically the end product of NLP algorithms, CEM-based semantics explicitly build in deep clinical semantics as the point of interoperability with more structured data types.

Classifying a Person's Degree of Accessibility From Natural Body Language During Social Human-Robot Interactions.

Science.gov (United States)

McColl, Derek; Jiang, Chuan; Nejat, Goldie

2017-02-01

For social robots to be successfully integrated and accepted within society, they need to be able to interpret human social cues that are displayed through natural modes of communication. In particular, a key challenge in the design of social robots is developing the robot's ability to recognize a person's affective states (emotions, moods, and attitudes) in order to respond appropriately during social human-robot interactions (HRIs). In this paper, we present and discuss social HRI experiments we have conducted to investigate the development of an accessibility-aware social robot able to autonomously determine a person's degree of accessibility (rapport, openness) toward the robot based on the person's natural static body language. In particular, we present two one-on-one HRI experiments to: 1) determine the performance of our automated system in being able to recognize and classify a person's accessibility levels and 2) investigate how people interact with an accessibility-aware robot which determines its own behaviors based on a person's speech and accessibility levels.

Language shift, bilingualism and the future of Britain's Celtic languages.

Science.gov (United States)

Kandler, Anne; Unger, Roman; Steele, James

2010-12-12

'Language shift' is the process whereby members of a community in which more than one language is spoken abandon their original vernacular language in favour of another. The historical shifts to English by Celtic language speakers of Britain and Ireland are particularly well-studied examples for which good census data exist for the most recent 100-120 years in many areas where Celtic languages were once the prevailing vernaculars. We model the dynamics of language shift as a competition process in which the numbers of speakers of each language (both monolingual and bilingual) vary as a function both of internal recruitment (as the net outcome of birth, death, immigration and emigration rates of native speakers), and of gains and losses owing to language shift. We examine two models: a basic model in which bilingualism is simply the transitional state for households moving between alternative monolingual states, and a diglossia model in which there is an additional demand for the endangered language as the preferred medium of communication in some restricted sociolinguistic domain, superimposed on the basic shift dynamics. Fitting our models to census data, we successfully reproduce the demographic trajectories of both languages over the past century. We estimate the rates of recruitment of new Scottish Gaelic speakers that would be required each year (for instance, through school education) to counteract the 'natural wastage' as households with one or more Gaelic speakers fail to transmit the language to the next generation informally, for different rates of loss during informal intergenerational transmission.

Language shift, bilingualism and the future of Britain's Celtic languages

Science.gov (United States)

Kandler, Anne; Unger, Roman; Steele, James

2010-01-01

‘Language shift’ is the process whereby members of a community in which more than one language is spoken abandon their original vernacular language in favour of another. The historical shifts to English by Celtic language speakers of Britain and Ireland are particularly well-studied examples for which good census data exist for the most recent 100–120 years in many areas where Celtic languages were once the prevailing vernaculars. We model the dynamics of language shift as a competition process in which the numbers of speakers of each language (both monolingual and bilingual) vary as a function both of internal recruitment (as the net outcome of birth, death, immigration and emigration rates of native speakers), and of gains and losses owing to language shift. We examine two models: a basic model in which bilingualism is simply the transitional state for households moving between alternative monolingual states, and a diglossia model in which there is an additional demand for the endangered language as the preferred medium of communication in some restricted sociolinguistic domain, superimposed on the basic shift dynamics. Fitting our models to census data, we successfully reproduce the demographic trajectories of both languages over the past century. We estimate the rates of recruitment of new Scottish Gaelic speakers that would be required each year (for instance, through school education) to counteract the ‘natural wastage’ as households with one or more Gaelic speakers fail to transmit the language to the next generation informally, for different rates of loss during informal intergenerational transmission. PMID:21041210

Concreteness and Psychological Distance in Natural Language Use.

Science.gov (United States)

Snefjella, Bryor; Kuperman, Victor

2015-09-01

Existing evidence shows that more abstract mental representations are formed and more abstract language is used to characterize phenomena that are more distant from the self. Yet the precise form of the functional relationship between distance and linguistic abstractness is unknown. In four studies, we tested whether more abstract language is used in textual references to more geographically distant cities (Study 1), time points further into the past or future (Study 2), references to more socially distant people (Study 3), and references to a specific topic (Study 4). Using millions of linguistic productions from thousands of social-media users, we determined that linguistic concreteness is a curvilinear function of the logarithm of distance, and we discuss psychological underpinnings of the mathematical properties of this relationship. We also demonstrated that gradient curvilinear effects of geographic and temporal distance on concreteness are nearly identical, which suggests uniformity in representation of abstractness along multiple dimensions. © The Author(s) 2015.

Mirror Neurons and the Evolution of Language

Science.gov (United States)

Corballis, Michael C.

2010-01-01

The mirror system provided a natural platform for the subsequent evolution of language. In nonhuman primates, the system provides for the understanding of biological action, and possibly for imitation, both prerequisites for language. I argue that language evolved from manual gestures, initially as a system of pantomime, but with gestures…

How could language have evolved?

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Bolhuis, Johan J.; Tattersall, Ian; Chomsky, Noam; Berwick, Robert C.

The evolution of the faculty of language largely remains an enigma. In this essay, we ask why. Language’s evolutionary analysis is complicated because it has no equivalent in any nonhuman species. There is also no consensus regarding the essential nature of the language ‘‘phenotype.’’ According to

Language and counting: Some recent results

Science.gov (United States)

Bell, Garry

1990-02-01

It has long been recognised that the language of mathematics is an important variable in the learning of mathematics, and there has been useful work in isolating and describing the linkage. Steffe and his co-workers at Georgia, for example, (Steffe, von Glasersfeld, Richardson and Cobb, 1983) have suggested that young children may construct verbal countable items to count objects which are hidden from their view. Although there has been a surge of research interest in counting and early childhood mathematics, and in cultural differences in mathematics attainment, there has been little work reported on the linkage between culture as exemplified by language, and initial concepts of numeration. This paper reports on some recent clinical research with kindergarten children of European and Asian background in Australia and America. The research examines the influence that number naming grammar appears to have on young children's understandings of two-digit numbers and place value. It appears that Transparent Standard Number Word Sequences such as Japanese, Chinese and Vietnamese which follow the numerical representation pattern by naming tens and units in order ("two tens three"), may be associated with distinctive place value concepts which may support sophisticated mental algorithms.

CORRELATION BETWEEN METACOGNITIVE STRATEGY, FOREIGN LANGUAGE APTITUDE AND MOTIVATIONS IN LANGUAGE LEARNING

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Novia Tri Febriani

2017-11-01

Full Text Available Language learning belief and language learning strategies are two essential predictors that have significant effect toward students’ language proficiency. Learners’ belief is dealing with what comes from inside the learners in learning the language, such as foreign language aptitude; difficulty of language learning; nature of language learning; learning and communication strategies; and motivation. Meanwhile, language learning strategies are learners’ plan in achieving certain goals or mastering the target language. A preliminary research was conducted in order to find what strategy mostly used by the learners. It turned out that the strategy mostly used by them was metacognitive strategies. Thus, this study aims to investigate about the correlation between metacognitive strategies and certain belief’ variables in students’ language learning which are foreign language aptitude and motivation. Moreover, twenty postgraduate students of English education department participated in this study. This study used correlational research, in which the BALLI (Beliefs about Language Learning Inventory and SILL (Strategies Inventory for Language Learners questionnaires were adopted as the instruments in collecting the data. The findings of this study indicated that there is negative linear correlation between metacognitive strategy and foreign language aptitude (rXY = -0,049 while there is significant positive linear correlation between metacognitive and motivation (rXY =+0,79 in students’ language learning. Furthermore, this study also provide some recommendations, which is it is expected that there will be more researches use studies using different respondents with various contexts. Secondly, the further research will use both of quantitative and qualitative data relating to this issue in order to make a more accurate data.

HAL/SM language specification. [programming languages and computer programming for space shuttles

Science.gov (United States)

Williams, G. P. W., Jr.; Ross, C.

1975-01-01

A programming language is presented for the flight software of the NASA Space Shuttle program. It is intended to satisfy virtually all of the flight software requirements of the space shuttle. To achieve this, it incorporates a wide range of features, including applications-oriented data types and organizations, real time control mechanisms, and constructs for systems programming tasks. It is a higher order language designed to allow programmers, analysts, and engineers to communicate with the computer in a form approximating natural mathematical expression. Parts of the English language are combined with standard notation to provide a tool that readily encourages programming without demanding computer hardware expertise. Block diagrams and flow charts are included. The semantics of the language is discussed.

The portrayal of natural environment in the evolution of the ecological public health paradigm.

Science.gov (United States)

Coutts, Christopher; Forkink, Annet; Weiner, Jocelyn

2014-01-10

This paper explores the conceptualization of the natural environment in an evolving ecological public health paradigm. The natural environment has long been recognized as essential to supporting life, health, and wellbeing. Our understanding of the relationship between the natural environment and health has steadily evolved from one of an undynamic environment to a more sophisticated understanding of ecological interactions.  This evolution is reflected in a number of ecological public health models which demonstrate the many external and overlapping determinants of human health. Six models are presented here to demonstrate this evolution, each model reflecting an increasingly ecological appreciation for the fundamental role of the natural environment in supporting human health. We conclude that after decades of public health's acceptance of the ecological paradigm, we are only now beginning to assemble knowledge of sophisticated ecological interdependencies and apply this knowledge to the conceptualization and study of the relationship between the natural environment and the determinants of human health.

Applying language technology to nursing documents: pros and cons with a focus on ethics.

Science.gov (United States)

Suominen, Hanna; Lehtikunnas, Tuija; Back, Barbro; Karsten, Helena; Salakoski, Tapio; Salanterä, Sanna

2007-10-01

The present study discusses ethics in building and using applications based on natural language processing in electronic nursing documentation. Specifically, we first focus on the question of how patient confidentiality can be ensured in developing language technology for the nursing documentation domain. Then, we identify and theoretically analyze the ethical outcomes which arise when using natural language processing to support clinical judgement and decision-making. In total, we put forward and justify 10 claims related to ethics in applying language technology to nursing documents. A review of recent scientific articles related to ethics in electronic patient records or in the utilization of large databases was conducted. Then, the results were compared with ethical guidelines for nurses and the Finnish legislation covering health care and processing of personal data. Finally, the practical experiences of the authors in applying the methods of natural language processing to nursing documents were appended. Patient records supplemented with natural language processing capabilities may help nurses give better, more efficient and more individualized care for their patients. In addition, language technology may facilitate patients' possibility to receive truthful information about their health and improve the nature of narratives. Because of these benefits, research about the use of language technology in narratives should be encouraged. In contrast, privacy-sensitive health care documentation brings specific ethical concerns and difficulties to the natural language processing of nursing documents. Therefore, when developing natural language processing tools, patient confidentiality must be ensured. While using the tools, health care personnel should always be responsible for the clinical judgement and decision-making. One should also consider that the use of language technology in nursing narratives may threaten patients' rights by using documentation collected

Fundamentals of reversible flowchart languages

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Yokoyama, Tetsuo; Axelsen, Holger Bock; Glück, Robert

2016-01-01

Abstract This paper presents the fundamentals of reversible flowcharts. They are intended to naturally represent the structure and control flow of reversible (imperative) programming languages in a simple computation model, in the same way classical flowcharts do for conventional languages......, structured reversible flowcharts are as expressive as unstructured ones, as shown by a reversible version of the classic Structured Program Theorem. We illustrate how reversible flowcharts can be concretized with two example programming languages, complete with syntax and semantics: a low-level unstructured...... language and a high-level structured language. We introduce concrete tools such as program inverters and translators for both languages, which follow the structure suggested by the flowchart model. To further illustrate the different concepts and tools brought together in this paper, we present two major...

Linguistic coding deficits in foreign language learners.

Science.gov (United States)

Sparks, R; Ganschow, L; Pohlman, J

1989-01-01

As increasing numbers of colleges and universities require a foreign language for graduation in at least one of their degree programs, reports of students with difficulties in learning a second language are multiplying. Until recently, little research has been conducted to identify the nature of this problem. Recent attempts by the authors have focused upon subtle but ongoing language difficulties in these individuals as the source of their struggle to learn a foreign language. The present paper attempts to expand upon this concept by outlining a theoretical framework based upon a linguistic coding model that hypothesizes deficits in the processing of phonological, syntactic, and/or semantic information. Traditional psychoeducational assessment batteries of standardized intelligence and achievement tests generally are not sensitive to these linguistic coding deficits unless closely analyzed or, more often, used in conjunction with a more comprehensive language assessment battery. Students who have been waived from a foreign language requirement and their proposed type(s) of linguistic coding deficits are profiled. Tentative conclusions about the nature of these foreign language learning deficits are presented along with specific suggestions for tests to be used in psychoeducational evaluations.

Reflections on foreign language study for students with language learning problems: research, issues and challenges.

Science.gov (United States)

Ganschow, L; Sparks, R L

2000-01-01

The study of foreign language (FL) learning for individuals who have found learning to read and write in their first language extremely problematic has been an under-researched area throughout the world. Since the 1980s, Leonore Ganschow and Richard Sparks have conducted pioneering research into the nature of difficulties, why they are encountered and how they can be minimized. In this paper the authors trace the development of their research on foreign language difficulties for students with language learning problems. They provide a summary of their findings and suggest new questions and directions for the field.

A Serious Game for Second Language Acquisition in a Virtual Environment

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Laura Perez-Beltrachini

2012-02-01

Full Text Available In this paper, we present I-FLEG, a 3D language game designed for interactively learning French as a second language. I-FLEG differs from previous computer-aided language learning (CALL approaches in that it combines a situated, language learning environment with advanced artificial intelligence and natural language generation techniques which support user adaptivity and the automatic, context-aware generation of learning material. In addition, because it is integrated in a 3D virtual reality environment, IFLEG naturally supports e-learning and facilitates the collection of test data.

233 Meaning and the Second Language Learner Jane Nkechi ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

Ike Odimegwu

second language learner seeks to interpret word meaning without reference to the .... Meaning can be natural but language is conventional - that is there is no .... language learner is usually engaged in processing contextual information to ...

Accounting Knowledge Representation in PROLOG Language

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Bogdan Patrut

2010-03-01

Full Text Available This paper presents some original techniques for implementing accounting knowledge in PROLOG language. We will represent rules of operation of accounts, the texts of accounting operations, and how to compute the depreciation.Keywords: accounting, knowledge representation, PROLOG, depreciation, natural language processing

Close to the Clothes : Materiality and Sophisticated Archaism in Alexander van Slobbe’s Design Practices

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Baronian, M.-A.

This article looks at the work of contemporary Dutch fashion designer Alexander van Slobbe (1959) and examines how, since the 1990s, his fashion practices have consistently and consciously put forward a unique reflection on questions related to materiality, sophisticated archaism, luxury,

Close to the Clothes: Materiality and Sophisticated Archaism in Alexander van Slobbe’s Design Practices

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Baronian, M.-A.

This article looks at the work of contemporary Dutch fashion designer Alexander van Slobbe (1959) and examines how, since the 1990s, his fashion practices have consistently and consciously put forward a unique reflection on questions related to materiality, sophisticated archaism, luxury,

Speech language therapy bilingual clinic, a written language therapeutical proposal to deaf people: case report.

Science.gov (United States)

Guarinello, Ana Cristina; Massi, Giselle; Berberian, Ana Paula; Tonocchi, Rita; Lustosa, Sandra Silva

2015-01-01

This study aimed to analyze the written production of a deaf person who is in the process of written language acquisition. One person with hearing disability, called R., participated in this study together with his Speech Language Pathologist. The therapist, proficient in sign language, acted as an interlocutor and interpreter, prioritizing the interactive nature of language and interfering in the written production only when it was requested. During the 3 years of work with R., a change in stance toward written language was observed. In addition, he began to reflect on his texts and utilize written Portuguese in a way that allowed his texts to be more coherent. Writing became an opportunity to show his singularity and to begin reconstructing his relationship with language. Speech language pathology and audiology therapy, at a bilingual clinic, can allow people with hearing disability early access to sign language and, consequently, enable the development of the written form of Portuguese.

Language, culture, and task shifting--an emerging challenge for global mental health.

Science.gov (United States)

Swartz, Leslie; Kilian, Sanja; Twesigye, Justus; Attah, Dzifa; Chiliza, Bonginkosi

2014-01-01

Language is at the heart of mental health care. Many high-income countries have sophisticated interpreter services, but in low- and middle-income countries there are not sufficient professional services, let alone interpreter services, and task shifting is used. In this article, we discuss this neglected issue in the context of low- and middle-income countries, where task shifting has been suggested as a solution to the problem of scarce mental health resources. The large diversity of languages in low- and middle-income countries, exacerbated by wide-scale migration, has implications for the scale-up of services. We suggest that it would be useful for those who are working innovatively to develop locally delivered mental health programmes in low- and middle-income countries to explore and report on issues of language and how these have been addressed. We need to know more about local challenges, but also about local solutions which seem to work, and for this we need more information from the field than is currently available.

Language in Comparative Perspective. Chapter 11

Science.gov (United States)

Rumbaugh, Duane M.; Savage-Rumbaugh, E. Sue

1994-01-01

The twentieth century will be noted for a wide variety of scientific and technological advancements, including powered flight, antibiotics, space travel, and the breaking of the genetic code. It also should be noted as the century in which major psychological, as well as biological, continuities between animal and human have been defined. Charles Darwin (1859) was quite right when he anticipated continuity in mental processes, some of which provide for language. Though none will argue that any animal has the full capacity of humans for language, none should deny that at least some animals have quite impressive competencies for language skills, including speech comprehension. The finding that the language skills in the bonobo and the chimpanzee are likely more fully and efficiently developed as a result of early rearing than by formal training at a later age declares a continuity even stronger than that defined by the language acquisition potential of the ape. To clarify, because early rearing facilitates the emergence of language in ape as well as in child, a naturalness to the familiar course of language acquisition, whereby comprehension precedes production, is also corroborated. In turn, the continuity and the shared naturalness of language acquisition serve jointly to define an advanced and critical point of linkage between the genera Pan and Homo - and, as concluded by Domjan (1993), one worthy of contributing to the series of reconceptions of ourselves as anticipated by Ploog and Melnechuk (1971).

Language contact phenomena in the language use of speakers of German descent and the significance of their language attitudes

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Ries, Veronika

2014-03-01

Full Text Available Within the scope of my investigation on language use and language attitudes of People of German Descent from the USSR, I find almost regular different language contact phenomena, such as viel bliny habn=wir gbackt (engl.: 'we cooked lots of pancakes' (cf. Ries 2011. The aim of analysis is to examine both language use with regard to different forms of language contact and the language attitudes of the observed speakers. To be able to analyse both of these aspects and synthesize them, different types of data are required. The research is based on the following two data types: everyday conversations and interviews. In addition, the individual speakers' biography is a key part of the analysis, because it allows one to draw conclusions about language attitudes and use. This qualitative research is based on morpho-syntactic and interactional linguistic analysis of authentic spoken data. The data arise from a corpus compiled and edited by myself. My being a member of the examined group allowed me to build up an authentic corpus. The natural language use is analysed from the perspective of different language contact phenomena and potential functions of language alternations. One central issue is: How do speakers use the languages available to them, German and Russian? Structural characteristics such as code switching and discursive motives for these phenomena are discussed as results, together with the socio-cultural background of the individual speaker. Within the scope of this article I present exemplarily the data and results of one speaker.

The Necessity of Linguistic Sophistication for Social Workers

Science.gov (United States)

Cormican, Elin J.; Cormican, John D.

1977-01-01

English language study should be introduced into the social work curriculum since various social judgments people make about each other on the basis of dialectal differences may interfere with communication between social workers and their clients, coworkers, or the general community. (Author/LBH)

Informal Language Learning Setting: Technology or Social Interaction?

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Bahrani, Taher; Sim, Tam Shu

2012-01-01

Based on the informal language learning theory, language learning can occur outside the classroom setting unconsciously and incidentally through interaction with the native speakers or exposure to authentic language input through technology. However, an EFL context lacks the social interaction which naturally occurs in an ESL context. To explore…

A Snapshot of Serial Rape: An Investigation of Criminal Sophistication and Use of Force on Victim Injury and Severity of the Assault.

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de Heer, Brooke

2016-02-01

Prior research on rapes reported to law enforcement has identified criminal sophistication and the use of force against the victim as possible unique identifiers to serial rape versus one-time rape. This study sought to contribute to the current literature on reported serial rape by investigating how the level of criminal sophistication of the rapist and use of force used were associated with two important outcomes of rape: victim injury and overall severity of the assault. In addition, it was evaluated whether rapist and victim ethnicity affected these relationships. A nation-wide sample of serial rape cases reported to law enforcement collected by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was analyzed (108 rapists, 543 victims). Results indicated that serial rapists typically used a limited amount of force against the victim and displayed a high degree of criminal sophistication. In addition, the more criminally sophisticated the perpetrator was, the more sexual acts he performed on his victim. Finally, rapes between a White rapist and White victim were found to exhibit higher levels of criminal sophistication and were more severe in terms of number and types of sexual acts committed. These findings provide a more in-depth understanding of serial rape that can inform both academics and practitioners in the field about contributors to victim injury and severity of the assault. © The Author(s) 2014.

"Use Your Words:" Reconsidering the Language of Conflict in the Early Years

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Blank, Jolyn; Schneider, Jenifer Jasinski

2011-01-01

This article explores the nature of classroom conflict as language practice. The authors describe the enactment of conflict events in one kindergarten classroom and analyze the events in order to identify the language practices teachers use, considering teachers' desires for language use in relation to conflict and exploring the nature of the…

Challenges of Effective English Language Learning in Nigeria ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

The factors that influence the students. effective learning of the English Language as second language learners, the attitude of students towards the study of the English language, the nature of teacher/student interaction, the methods of teaching and the availability of teaching aids in Nigeria secondary schools are looked ...

Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Language and General Semantics.

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Lapointe, Francois H.

A survey of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's views on the phenomenology of language yields insight into the basic semiotic nature of language. Merleau-ponty's conceptions stand in opposition to Saussure's linguistic postulations and Korzybski's scientism. That is, if language is studied phenomenologically, the acts of speech and gesture take on greater…

How could language have evolved?

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Bolhuis, Johan J; Tattersall, Ian; Chomsky, Noam; Berwick, Robert C

2014-08-01

The evolution of the faculty of language largely remains an enigma. In this essay, we ask why. Language's evolutionary analysis is complicated because it has no equivalent in any nonhuman species. There is also no consensus regarding the essential nature of the language "phenotype." According to the "Strong Minimalist Thesis," the key distinguishing feature of language (and what evolutionary theory must explain) is hierarchical syntactic structure. The faculty of language is likely to have emerged quite recently in evolutionary terms, some 70,000-100,000 years ago, and does not seem to have undergone modification since then, though individual languages do of course change over time, operating within this basic framework. The recent emergence of language and its stability are both consistent with the Strong Minimalist Thesis, which has at its core a single repeatable operation that takes exactly two syntactic elements a and b and assembles them to form the set {a, b}.

How Could Language Have Evolved?

Science.gov (United States)

Bolhuis, Johan J.; Tattersall, Ian; Chomsky, Noam; Berwick, Robert C.

2014-01-01

The evolution of the faculty of language largely remains an enigma. In this essay, we ask why. Language's evolutionary analysis is complicated because it has no equivalent in any nonhuman species. There is also no consensus regarding the essential nature of the language “phenotype.” According to the “Strong Minimalist Thesis,” the key distinguishing feature of language (and what evolutionary theory must explain) is hierarchical syntactic structure. The faculty of language is likely to have emerged quite recently in evolutionary terms, some 70,000–100,000 years ago, and does not seem to have undergone modification since then, though individual languages do of course change over time, operating within this basic framework. The recent emergence of language and its stability are both consistent with the Strong Minimalist Thesis, which has at its core a single repeatable operation that takes exactly two syntactic elements a and b and assembles them to form the set {a, b}. PMID:25157536

How could language have evolved?

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Johan J Bolhuis

2014-08-01

Full Text Available The evolution of the faculty of language largely remains an enigma. In this essay, we ask why. Language's evolutionary analysis is complicated because it has no equivalent in any nonhuman species. There is also no consensus regarding the essential nature of the language "phenotype." According to the "Strong Minimalist Thesis," the key distinguishing feature of language (and what evolutionary theory must explain is hierarchical syntactic structure. The faculty of language is likely to have emerged quite recently in evolutionary terms, some 70,000-100,000 years ago, and does not seem to have undergone modification since then, though individual languages do of course change over time, operating within this basic framework. The recent emergence of language and its stability are both consistent with the Strong Minimalist Thesis, which has at its core a single repeatable operation that takes exactly two syntactic elements a and b and assembles them to form the set {a, b}.

Template Authoring Environment for the Automatic Generation of Narrative Content

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Caropreso, Maria Fernanda; Inkpen, Diana; Keshtkar, Fazel; Khan, Shahzad

2012-01-01

Natural Language Generation (NLG) systems can make data accessible in an easily digestible textual form; but using such systems requires sophisticated linguistic and sometimes even programming knowledge. We have designed and implemented an environment for creating and modifying NLG templates that requires no programming knowledge, and can operate…

Accurate Identification of Fatty Liver Disease in Data Warehouse Utilizing Natural Language Processing.

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Redman, Joseph S; Natarajan, Yamini; Hou, Jason K; Wang, Jingqi; Hanif, Muzammil; Feng, Hua; Kramer, Jennifer R; Desiderio, Roxanne; Xu, Hua; El-Serag, Hashem B; Kanwal, Fasiha

2017-10-01

Natural language processing is a powerful technique of machine learning capable of maximizing data extraction from complex electronic medical records. We utilized this technique to develop algorithms capable of "reading" full-text radiology reports to accurately identify the presence of fatty liver disease. Abdominal ultrasound, computerized tomography, and magnetic resonance imaging reports were retrieved from the Veterans Affairs Corporate Data Warehouse from a random national sample of 652 patients. Radiographic fatty liver disease was determined by manual review by two physicians and verified with an expert radiologist. A split validation method was utilized for algorithm development. For all three imaging modalities, the algorithms could identify fatty liver disease with >90% recall and precision, with F-measures >90%. These algorithms could be used to rapidly screen patient records to establish a large cohort to facilitate epidemiological and clinical studies and examine the clinic course and outcomes of patients with radiographic hepatic steatosis.

A Stronger Reason for the Right to Sign Languages

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Trovato, Sara

2013-01-01

Is the right to sign language only the right to a minority language? Holding a capability (not a disability) approach, and building on the psycholinguistic literature on sign language acquisition, I make the point that this right is of a stronger nature, since only sign languages can guarantee that each deaf child will properly develop the…

Reconceptualising Learning in Transdisciplinary Languages Education

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Scarino, Angela; Liddicoat, Anthony J.

2016-01-01

Understanding and working with the complexity of second language learning and use in an intercultural orientation necessitates a re-examination of the different theories of learning that inform the different schools of second language acquisition (SLA). This re-examination takes place in a context where explicitly conceptualizing the nature of…

On the relation between dependency distance, crossing dependencies, and parsing. Comment on "Dependency distance: a new perspective on syntactic patterns in natural languages" by Haitao Liu et al.

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Gómez-Rodríguez, Carlos

2017-07-01

Liu et al. [1] provide a comprehensive account of research on dependency distance in human languages. While the article is a very rich and useful report on this complex subject, here I will expand on a few specific issues where research in computational linguistics (specifically natural language processing) can inform DDM research, and vice versa. These aspects have not been explored much in [1] or elsewhere, probably due to the little overlap between both research communities, but they may provide interesting insights for improving our understanding of the evolution of human languages, the mechanisms by which the brain processes and understands language, and the construction of effective computer systems to achieve this goal.

Language Schools of MGIMO-University

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

G. I. Gladkov

2014-01-01

Full Text Available In 1943, when the Department of International Relations at MSU was established to develop one year later into the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO, the first task of the faculty was to teach future diplomats of foreign languages, which they for the most part simply did not know. Of course, in the midst of World War II, the most important foreign language seemed to be German. But the question was in providing for language support for the system of world diplomacy of the Soviet state. And pretty soon it became clear that proficiency in two foreign languages was the main advantage of MGIMO graduates over graduates of all other national universities. The language study at MGIMO is of applied nature: while studying languages students at the same time receive other professions - a diplomat, an economist, a lawyer, a journalist. Studying a language of profession became an academic niche of MGIMO. That is why today MGIMO entered the Guinness Book of Records for the number of foreign languages studied: 53 in 2014.

Some issues of creation of belarusian language computer resources

OpenAIRE

Rubashko, N.; Nevmerjitskaia, G.

2003-01-01

The main reason for creation of computer resources of natural language is the necessity to bring into accord the ways of language normalization with the form of its existence - the computer form of language usage should correspond to the computer form of language standards fixation. This paper discusses various aspects of the creation of Belarusian language computer resources. It also briefly gives an overview of the objectives of the project involved.

Natural Philosophy

OpenAIRE

Blair, Ann M.

2006-01-01

“Natural philosophy” is often used by European historians as an umbrella term to designate the study of nature before it can easily be identified with what we call “science” today, to avoid the modern and potentially anachronistic connotations of that term. But “natural philosophy” (and its equivalents in different languages) was also an actor's category, a term commonly used throughout the early modern period and typically defined quite broadly as the study of natural bodies. As the central ...

A human mirror neuron system for language: Perspectives from signed languages of the deaf.

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Knapp, Heather Patterson; Corina, David P

2010-01-01

Language is proposed to have developed atop the human analog of the macaque mirror neuron system for action perception and production [Arbib M.A. 2005. From monkey-like action recognition to human language: An evolutionary framework for neurolinguistics (with commentaries and author's response). Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 28, 105-167; Arbib M.A. (2008). From grasp to language: Embodied concepts and the challenge of abstraction. Journal de Physiologie Paris 102, 4-20]. Signed languages of the deaf are fully-expressive, natural human languages that are perceived visually and produced manually. We suggest that if a unitary mirror neuron system mediates the observation and production of both language and non-linguistic action, three prediction can be made: (1) damage to the human mirror neuron system should non-selectively disrupt both sign language and non-linguistic action processing; (2) within the domain of sign language, a given mirror neuron locus should mediate both perception and production; and (3) the action-based tuning curves of individual mirror neurons should support the highly circumscribed set of motions that form the "vocabulary of action" for signed languages. In this review we evaluate data from the sign language and mirror neuron literatures and find that these predictions are only partially upheld. 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

A real-time spoken-language system for interactive problem-solving, combining linguistic and statistical technology for improved spoken language understanding

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Moore, Robert C.; Cohen, Michael H.

1993-09-01

Under this effort, SRI has developed spoken-language technology for interactive problem solving, featuring real-time performance for up to several thousand word vocabularies, high semantic accuracy, habitability within the domain, and robustness to many sources of variability. Although the technology is suitable for many applications, efforts to date have focused on developing an Air Travel Information System (ATIS) prototype application. SRI's ATIS system has been evaluated in four ARPA benchmark evaluations, and has consistently been at or near the top in performance. These achievements are the result of SRI's technical progress in speech recognition, natural-language processing, and speech and natural-language integration.

Programming languages for synthetic biology.

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Umesh, P; Naveen, F; Rao, Chanchala Uma Maheswara; Nair, Achuthsankar S

2010-12-01

In the backdrop of accelerated efforts for creating synthetic organisms, the nature and scope of an ideal programming language for scripting synthetic organism in-silico has been receiving increasing attention. A few programming languages for synthetic biology capable of defining, constructing, networking, editing and delivering genome scale models of cellular processes have been recently attempted. All these represent important points in a spectrum of possibilities. This paper introduces Kera, a state of the art programming language for synthetic biology which is arguably ahead of similar languages or tools such as GEC, Antimony and GenoCAD. Kera is a full-fledged object oriented programming language which is tempered by biopart rule library named Samhita which captures the knowledge regarding the interaction of genome components and catalytic molecules. Prominent feature of the language are demonstrated through a toy example and the road map for the future development of Kera is also presented.

Automatic Determination of the Need for Intravenous Contrast in Musculoskeletal MRI Examinations Using IBM Watson's Natural Language Processing Algorithm.

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Trivedi, Hari; Mesterhazy, Joseph; Laguna, Benjamin; Vu, Thienkhai; Sohn, Jae Ho

2018-04-01

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) protocoling can be time- and resource-intensive, and protocols can often be suboptimal dependent upon the expertise or preferences of the protocoling radiologist. Providing a best-practice recommendation for an MRI protocol has the potential to improve efficiency and decrease the likelihood of a suboptimal or erroneous study. The goal of this study was to develop and validate a machine learning-based natural language classifier that can automatically assign the use of intravenous contrast for musculoskeletal MRI protocols based upon the free-text clinical indication of the study, thereby improving efficiency of the protocoling radiologist and potentially decreasing errors. We utilized a deep learning-based natural language classification system from IBM Watson, a question-answering supercomputer that gained fame after challenging the best human players on Jeopardy! in 2011. We compared this solution to a series of traditional machine learning-based natural language processing techniques that utilize a term-document frequency matrix. Each classifier was trained with 1240 MRI protocols plus their respective clinical indications and validated with a test set of 280. Ground truth of contrast assignment was obtained from the clinical record. For evaluation of inter-reader agreement, a blinded second reader radiologist analyzed all cases and determined contrast assignment based on only the free-text clinical indication. In the test set, Watson demonstrated overall accuracy of 83.2% when compared to the original protocol. This was similar to the overall accuracy of 80.2% achieved by an ensemble of eight traditional machine learning algorithms based on a term-document matrix. When compared to the second reader's contrast assignment, Watson achieved 88.6% agreement. When evaluating only the subset of cases where the original protocol and second reader were concordant (n = 251), agreement climbed further to 90.0%. The classifier was

Autistic symptomatology and language ability in autism spectrum disorder and specific language impairment.

Science.gov (United States)

Loucas, Tom; Charman, Tony; Pickles, Andrew; Simonoff, Emily; Chandler, Susie; Meldrum, David; Baird, Gillian

2008-11-01

Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and specific language impairment (SLI) are common developmental disorders characterised by deficits in language and communication. The nature of the relationship between them continues to be a matter of debate. This study investigates whether the co-occurrence of ASD and language impairment is associated with differences in severity or pattern of autistic symptomatology or language profile. Participants (N = 97) were drawn from a total population cohort of 56,946 screened as part of study to ascertain the prevalence of ASD, aged 9 to 14 years. All children received an ICD-10 clinical diagnosis of ASD or No ASD. Children with nonverbal IQ > or =80 were divided into those with a language impairment (language score of 77 or less) and those without, creating three groups: children with ASD and a language impairment (ALI; N = 41), those with ASD and but no language impairment (ANL; N = 31) and those with language impairment but no ASD (SLI; N = 25). Children with ALI did not show more current autistic symptoms than those with ANL. Children with SLI were well below the threshold for ASD. Their social adaptation was higher than the ASD groups, but still nearly 2 SD below average. In ALI the combination of ASD and language impairment was associated with weaker functional communication and more severe receptive language difficulties than those found in SLI. Receptive and expressive language were equally impaired in ALI, whereas in SLI receptive language was stronger than expressive. Co-occurrence of ASD and language impairment is not associated with increased current autistic symptomatology but appears to be associated with greater impairment in receptive language and functional communication.

In silico Evolutionary Developmental Neurobiology and the Origin of Natural Language

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Szathmáry, Eörs; Szathmáry, Zoltán; Ittzés, Péter; Orbaán, Geroő; Zachár, István; Huszár, Ferenc; Fedor, Anna; Varga, Máté; Számadó, Szabolcs

It is justified to assume that part of our genetic endowment contributes to our language skills, yet it is impossible to tell at this moment exactly how genes affect the language faculty. We complement experimental biological studies by an in silico approach in that we simulate the evolution of neuronal networks under selection for language-related skills. At the heart of this project is the Evolutionary Neurogenetic Algorithm (ENGA) that is deliberately biomimetic. The design of the system was inspired by important biological phenomena such as brain ontogenesis, neuron morphologies, and indirect genetic encoding. Neuronal networks were selected and were allowed to reproduce as a function of their performance in the given task. The selected neuronal networks in all scenarios were able to solve the communication problem they had to face. The most striking feature of the model is that it works with highly indirect genetic encoding--just as brains do.

Genes, language, and the nature of scientific explanations: the case of Williams syndrome.

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Musolino, Julien; Landau, Barbara

2012-01-01

In this article, we discuss two experiments of nature and their implications for the sciences of the mind. The first, Williams syndrome, bears on one of cognitive science's holy grails: the possibility of unravelling the causal chain between genes and cognition. We sketch the outline of a general framework to study the relationship between genes and cognition, focusing as our case study on the development of language in individuals with Williams syndrome. Our approach emphasizes the role of three key ingredients: the need to specify a clear level of analysis, the need to provide a theoretical account of the relevant cognitive structure at that level, and the importance of the (typical) developmental process itself. The promise offered by the case of Williams syndrome has also given rise to two strongly conflicting theoretical approaches-modularity and neuroconstructivism-themselves offshoots of a perennial debate between nativism and empiricism. We apply our framework to explore the tension created by these two conflicting perspectives. To this end, we discuss a second experiment of nature, which allows us to compare the two competing perspectives in what comes close to a controlled experimental setting. From this comparison, we conclude that the "meaningful debate assumption", a widespread assumption suggesting that neuroconstructivism and modularity address the same questions and represent genuine theoretical alternatives, rests on a fallacy.