287 research outputs found
Computational construction grammar and constructional change /
No full textIncludes bibliographical references.Computational construction grammar and constructional change / Katrien Beuls and Remi van Trijp -- Chopping down the syntax tree : what constructions can do instead / Remi van Trijp -- For a radically usage-based diachronic construction grammar / Dirk Noël -- Tracking shifts in the literal versus the intensifying fake reflexive resultative construction : the development of intensifying dood ‘dead’ in 19th–20th century Dutch / Emmeline Gyselinck and Timothy Colleman -- A reflection on constructionalization and constructional borrowing, inspired by an emerging Dutch replica of the ‘time’-away construction / Timothy Colleman -- Unidirectionality as a cycle of convention and innovation : micro-changes in the grammaticalization of [BE going to INF] / Peter Petré -- A boy named Sue : the semiotic dynamics of naming and identity / Luc Steels, Martin Loetzsch and Michael Spranger -- A gentle introduction to the minimal Naming Game / Andrea Baronchelli -- The evolution of lexical usage profiles in social networks / Gerhard Schaden -- Modelling pronominal gender agreement in Dutch : from a syntactic to a semantic strategy / Roxana Rădulescu and Katrien Beuls -- Embodied cognitive semantics for quantification / Simon Pauw and Joseph Hilferty -- Why are embodied experiments relevant to cognitive linguistics? / Javier Valenzuela, Joseph Hilferty and Oscar Vilarroya
Hybrid Procedural Semantics for Visual Dialogue:An Interactive Web Demonstration
Full text linkVisual dialogue refers to the task in which a conversational agent needs to hold a meaningful and coherent conversation with a human interlocutor about a scene they observe. To tackle this task, we introduce a novel methodology that makes use of (i) a novel data structure, called the conversation memory, which holds information that is incrementally conveyed in the conversation and (ii) a hybrid procedural semantic representation that is grounded in both the visual input and the conversation memory. In this paper, we present a demonstration that showcases this novel methodology. In this demonstration, a user can interact with a visual dialogue agent and discuss an image of their choice. While the agent is answering questions, the user can follow the agent’s reasoning process. Due to its explainable and interpretable nature, the novel methodology can be used in a wide range of application domains, especially when it is important that the system is human-interpretable. We believe that this novel methodology of hybrid procedural semantics combined with a conversation memory paves the way for building truly intelligent and explainable systems that are able to hold human-like conversations.</p
Hybrid Procedural Semantics for Visual Dialogue:An Interactive Web Demonstration
Full text linkVisual dialogue refers to the task in which a conversational agent needs to hold a meaningful and coherent conversation with a human interlocutor about a scene they observe. To tackle this task, we introduce a novel methodology that makes use of (i) a novel data structure, called the conversation memory, which holds information that is incrementally conveyed in the conversation and (ii) a hybrid procedural semantic representation that is grounded in both the visual input and the conversation memory. In this paper, we present a demonstration that showcases this novel methodology. In this demonstration, a user can interact with a visual dialogue agent and discuss an image of their choice. While the agent is answering questions, the user can follow the agent’s reasoning process. Due to its explainable and interpretable nature, the novel methodology can be used in a wide range of application domains, especially when it is important that the system is human-interpretable. We believe that this novel methodology of hybrid procedural semantics combined with a conversation memory paves the way for building truly intelligent and explainable systems that are able to hold human-like conversations.</p
Fluid construction grammar for historical and evolutionary linguistics
No full textFluid Construction Grammar (FCG) is an open-source computational grammar formalism
that is becoming increasingly popular for studying the history and evolution of language. This demonstration shows how FCG can be used to operationalise the cultural processes and cognitive mechanisms that underly language evolution and change.The FCG formalism is being developed at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris. Pieter Wellens has been supported by the ESF EuroUnderstanding project DRUST funded by FWO and by the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Katrien Beuls received funding from a strategic basic research grant from the agency for Innovation by Science and Technology
(IWT). Remi van Trijp is funded by the Sony Computer Science Laboratory Paris.Peer Reviewe
Agent-Based Models of Strategies for the Emergence and Evolution of Grammatical Agreement
Full text linkGrammatical agreement means that features associated with one linguistic unit (for example number or gender) become associated with another unit and then possibly overtly expressed, typically with morphological markers. It is one of the key mechanisms used in many languages to show that certain linguistic units within an utterance grammatically depend on each other. Agreement systems are puzzling because they can be highly complex in terms of what features they use and how they are expressed. Moreover, agreement systems have undergone considerable change in the historical evolution of languages. This article presents language game models with populations of agents in order to find out for what reasons and by what cultural processes and cognitive strategies agreement systems arise. It demonstrates that agreement systems are motivated by the need to minimize combinatorial search and semantic ambiguity, and it shows, for the first time, that once a population of agents adopts a strategy to invent, acquire and coordinate meaningful markers through social learning, linguistic self-organization leads to the spontaneous emergence and cultural transmission of an agreement system. The article also demonstrates how attested grammaticalization phenomena, such as phonetic reduction and conventionalized use of agreement markers, happens as a side effect of additional economizing principles, in particular minimization of articulatory effort and reduction of the marker inventory. More generally, the article illustrates a novel approach for studying how key features of human languages might emerge. © 2013 Beuls, Steels.The authors gratefully acknowledge support from ICREA (Catalan Institute for Advanced Studies) to L.S., the IWT (Flemish Fund for Applied Science) to K.B., and a Marie Curie Integration grant (ITN) to the Institut de Biologia Evolutiva (Barcelona).Peer Reviewe
Towards conflictual narrative mechanics
Full text linkWe propose a five steps methodology to retrieve, reconstruct and analyse conflict related narratives in a standardized and automated way. Our methodology combines AI and network analysis techniques to build a visual representation of key agents and entities involved in a conflict and to characterize their relations.
Unlike the majority of existing methods, ours can be applied to any type of conflict, as, through two data downloading phases, it first generates a bird’s-eye representation and then a fine-grained map of any conflict.
Given the broad applicability of the proposed methodology, we believe that this work moves the first steps towards a better understanding of conflictual narrative mechanics
Séminaire de linguistique
No full textResponsable : Anne Carlier Thème de la séance : Langage & Évolution Prochaine séance : vendredi 23 mai 2014, 14h-17h Katrien Beuls & Luc Steels (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) : « Agent-Based Models of Strategies for the Emergence and Evolution of Grammatical Agreement » résumé Annemarie Verkerk : « Phylogenetic comparative analysis: an introduction and practical » résumé Université Lille 3, Bât. B, salle Danielle Corbin (B1.661
Creating inclusive classrooms in primary and secondary schools: From noticing to differentiated practices
No full textDifferentiated instruction is advocated as a means to create inclusive classrooms. The hypothesis guiding this study is that teachers' ability to notice inclusive teaching practices and to reason about it are connected to their differentiated practices. Two instruments are adopted to measure this: the e-PIC videography tool, that maps teachers' professional vision, and the DI-Quest, that measures self-reported differentiated practices. Clustering teachers' noticing and reasoning, this study found two groups of teachers. Results reveal that teachers who are more proficient at noticing inclusive practices, also report implementing more differentiated practices, compared to teachers who are less able at noticing them. (C) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.The adopted e-PIC videography instrument in this study was developed within the Potential project in cooperation with IMEC and the following people: Dr. Karolien Keppens, Iris Roose, Dr. Esther Gheyssens, Dr. Julia Griful-Freixenet, Prof. Dr. Katrien Struyven, Prof. Dr. Piet Van Avermaet, Prof. Dr. Ruben Vanderlinde, Prof. Dr. Els Consuegra, Dr. Wendelien Vantieghem, Kristof Van Damme and Martin Vanbrabant. We would like to thank them for their engagement. In addition, the authors of this study gratefully acknowledge the support of the POTENTIAL research and valorisation project (www.potentialproject.be) funded by the Flanders Innovation & Entrepreneurship (VLAIO).Gheyssens, E (corresponding author), Vrije Univ Brussel, Pl Laan 2, B-1050 Brussels, Belgium.
[email protected]
Generalisation and Specialisation Operators for Computational Construction Grammar and their Application in Evolutionary Linguistics Research
No full textThe natural languages that underlie human communication are remarkably expressive, robust and well-adapted to the communicative needs of their users. However, the question of how these languages have emerged and through which mechanisms they continue to evolve remains heavily debated. A common methodology for studying this question is to simulate the emergence and evolution of language using agent-based models. In these models, a population of autonomous agents, which are either physical robots or software entities, participates in a series of communicative interactions, known as language games. Each game is played by two agents in the population, one being the speaker and the other being the hearer. The game involves a scripted, communicative task, which either succeeds or fails. At the end of the game, the speaker provides feedback to the hearer, so that learning can take place. The goal of the models is to determine the exact mechanisms that need to be present in the individual agents, so that a communication system with human language-like properties can emerge and evolve.
While agent-based models have within the language game paradigm most extensively been used to study concept learning and vocabulary formation, they have more recently also been successfully applied to experiments on the emergence and evolution of grammar. In these models, the agents need to be equipped with a computational grammar formalism that supports robust and flexible language processing, including mechanisms for inventing and adopting grammatical structures. This dissertation presents three major contributions to the field of research that studies the modelling of the emergence and evolution of grammar.
The first contribution consists in the implementation of a new, higher-level notation for Fluid Construction Grammar (FCG). FCG is an advanced computational grammar formalism that is often used in evolutionary linguistics experiments. The new notation represents grammatical structures in a more intuitive way and abstracts away from low-level implementation details. This facilitates the use of FCG in language evolution experiments and the new notation has indeed already become FCG's standard notation.
The second contribution introduces powerful mechanisms for generalising and specialising grammatical constructions. The impasse that arises when agents are faced with utterances that they cannot process can often be overcome by adapting constraints that block the application of existing grammatical constructions. Previous experiments relied on ad hoc ways to detect and adapt these constraints. Here, I extend FCG with three general mechanisms: (i) an anti-unification based operator that finds the blocking constraints and their least general generalisations, (ii) a hierarchical type system that can capture these generalisations is a fine-grained way, and (iii) a pro-unification operator that imposes additional constraints on a construction, specialising it to specific cases.
The third contribution consists in a case study that demonstrates how the representations and mechanisms introduced above can be incorporated in an actual agent-based experiment. The experiment that I present here studies how early syntactic structures can emerge and evolve in a population of agents. In particular, it models how shared word order patterns can come into place and reduce the referential ambiguity of the language. The experiment makes use of the type hierarchy system to capture the association strength between words and slots in the word order patterns, and relies on the anti-unification operator to expand the coverage of existing patterns to novel words. The experiment shows that a coherent and efficient word order system rapidly emerges in a population of agents that are equipped with these general, local mechanisms.status: Publishe
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