53 research outputs found
Distributional models of category concepts based on names of category members
No full textCognitive scientists have long used distributional semantic representations of categories. The predominant approach uses distributional representations of category-denoting nouns, such as “city” for the category city. We propose a novel scheme that represents categories as prototypes over representations of names of its members, such as “Barcelona,” “Mumbai,” and “Wuhan” for the category city. This name-based representation empirically outperforms the noun-based representation on two experiments (modeling human judgments of category relatedness and predicting category membership) with particular improvements for ambiguous nouns. We discuss the model complexity of both classes of models and argue that the name-based model has superior explanatory potential with regard to concept acquisition.Abhijeet Gupta and Sebastian Padó received funding from Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) through Sonderforschungsbereich 732, project D10. Gemma Boleda and Matthijs Westera received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement no. 715154) and the Catalan government (SGR 2017 1575). Gemma Boleda also received funding from the Ramón y Cajal program (grant RYC-2015-18907). Matthijs Westera also received funding from Leiden University (LUCL, SAILS). We gratefully acknowledge the support of NVIDIA Corporation with the donation of GPUs used for this research. This paper reflects the authors’ view only, and the EU is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains
Rising declaratives of the quality-suspending kind
No full textThe theory of Intonational Compliance Marking (ICM) maintains that speakers of English use final rising intonation to indicate a suspension (potential violation) of a conversational maxim (Westera 2013; 2014). This paper aims to show that a certain kind of rising declarative, one which has been prominent in the literature (e.g., Gunlogson 2008), can be adequately understood in ICM’s terms as involving a suspension of the maxim of Quality. By explicating certain minimal assumptions about pragmatics, this understanding accounts for three core features of such rising declaratives: their question-likeness, the speaker bias they express and their badness out of the blue. In a nutshell, their question-likeness is derived from principles of general cooperative discourse, their bias from the relative importance of the maxim of Quality, and their badness out of the blue from a competition between rising declaratives and interrogatives. The account is compared in detail to various existing accounts of rising declaratives of the relevant sort, highlighting explanatory and empirical differences.This work has benefited from detailed commentary by four anonymous reviewers for Glossa, as well as Jeroen Groenendijk and Floris Roelofsen. Any remaining errors are of course my own. This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 715154)
An attention-based explanation for some exhaustivity operators
No full textA well-known challenge for accounts of exhaustivity implications is the granularity problem: that adding a non-weakest disjunct to an utterance (e.g., “or both”) may prevent exhaustivity implications. Recent approaches to this problem apply exhaustivity operators either globally, i.e., to the disjunction as a whole, or locally, i.e., to each disjunct separately. This paper seeks to contribute to a better understanding of the operators employed in the globalist strand, which, contrary to globalists’ aims, have not thus far been given any sort of pragmatic motivation. To that end this paper demonstrates that these operators can be derived, wholly or in part, from a pragmatic theory: Attentional Pragmatics (Westera, 2017). The theory centers on the assumption that speakers should not only assert all relevant propositions they hold true, but also draw attention to all relevant propositions they consider possible. This assumption, suitably formalized, overcomes the granularity problem. The current paper formally derives an exhaustivity operator from Attentional Pragmatics and proves that it is in important respects conservative with regard to existing operators
Rising declaratives of the quality-suspending kind
No full textThe theory of Intonational Compliance Marking (ICM) maintains that speakers of English use final rising intonation to indicate a suspension (potential violation) of a conversational maxim (Westera 2013; 2014). This paper aims to show that a certain kind of rising declarative, one which has been prominent in the literature (e.g., Gunlogson 2008), can be adequately understood in ICM’s terms as involving a suspension of the maxim of Quality. By explicating certain minimal assumptions about pragmatics, this understanding accounts for three core features of such rising declaratives: their question-likeness, the speaker bias they express and their badness out of the blue. In a nutshell, their question-likeness is derived from principles of general cooperative discourse, their bias from the relative importance of the maxim of Quality, and their badness out of the blue from a competition between rising declaratives and interrogatives. The account is compared in detail to various existing accounts of rising declaratives of the relevant sort, highlighting explanatory and empirical differences.This work has benefited from detailed commentary by four anonymous reviewers for Glossa, as well as Jeroen Groenendijk and Floris Roelofsen. Any remaining errors are of course my own. This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 715154)
Distributional models of category concepts based on names of category members
No full textData and code for the paper Westera, Gupta, Boleda & Padó (2021) Distributional models of category concepts based on names of category members
Event structure, conceptual spaces and the semantics of verbs
No full textThe aim of this paper is to integrate spatial cognition with lexical semantics. We develop cognitive models of actions and events based on conceptual spaces and vectors on them. The models are then used to present a semantic theory of verbs.
We propose a two-vector model of events including a force vector and a result vector. We argue that our framework provides a unified account of a multiplicity of linguistic phenomena related to verbs. Among others it provides a cognitive explanation of the lexical constraint regarding manner vs. result and polysemy caused by intentionality. It also generates a unified definition of aspect
Similarity or deeper understanding?: analyzing the TED-Q dataset of evoked questions
No full textComunicació presentada al 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics celebrat del 8 al 13 de desembre de 2020 de manera virtual.We take a close look at a recent dataset of TED-talks annotated with the questions they implicitly evoke, TED-Q (Westera et al., 2020). We test to what extent the relation between a discourse and the questions it evokes is merely one of similarity or association, as opposed to deeper semantic/pragmatic interpretation. We do so by turning the TED-Q dataset into a binary classification task, constructing an analogous task from explicit questions we extract from the BookCorpus (Zhu et al., 2015), and fitting a BERT-based classifier alongside models based on different notions of similarity. The BERT-based classifier, achieving close to human performance, outperforms all similarity-based models, suggesting that there is more to identifying true evoked questions than plain similarity.This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 715154) and from the Spanish State Research Agency (AEI) and the European Regional Development Fund (FEDER, UE) (project PGC2018-094029-A-I00)
Exhaustivity Through the Maxim of Relation
No full textI show that the exhaustive interpretation of answers can be explained as a conversational implicature through the Maxim of Relation, dealing with the problematic epistemic step (Sauerland, 2004). I assume a fairly standard Maxim of Relation, that captures the same intuition as Roberts' (1996) contextual entailment. I show that if a richer notion of meaning is adopted, in particular that of attentive semantics (Roelofsen, 2011), this Maxim of Relation automatically becomes strong enough to enable exhaustivity implicatures. The results suggest that pragmatic reasoning is sensitive not only to the information an utterance provides, but also to the possibilities it draws attention to. Foremost, it shows that exhaustivity implicatures can be genuine conversational implicatures
QUDs, brevity, and the asymmetry of alternatives
No full textComunicació presentada al Amsterdam Colloquium 2017, celebrat a Amsterdam (Holanda) del 20 a 22 de desembre de 2017Exhaustivity is typically explained in terms of the exclusion of unmentioned alternatives. For this to work, the set of alternatives must be asymmetrical, lest both a proposition and its negation get excluded, yielding a contradiction (the Symmetry Problem). Since exhaustivity is regularly observed, these alternative sets must tend to be asymmetrical, and this requires an explanation. Existing explanations are based on considerations of brevity, but these run into certain problems. A new solution is proposed, explaining the asymmetry of alternatives in terms of the fact that discourse strategies with asymmetrical questions under discussion (Quds) are favored because they allow part of the answer to be communicated implicitly, namely as an exhaustivity implicature.Many thanks to Floris Roelofsen and Jeroen Groenendijk for their comments on many iterations of this work. This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Unions Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 715154). This paper reflects the authors’ view only, and the EU is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains
- …
