555 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
Societal need for multifunctional flood defenses: Introduction
No full textProf.dr.ir. Matthijs Kok is Professor of Flood Risk at the Faculty of Civil Engineering and Geosciences at TU Delft; he was Program leader of the ‘Integral and Sustainable Design of Multifunctional Flood Defenses’ research program, funded by the Dutch Science and Technology Foundation STW. Presently, he is Program leader of the STW-Perspectief research program ‘All RISK’, which will study the implementation of new risk standards in the Dutch national flood protection program (2017-2022). Hydraulic Structures and Flood Ris
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)
Correction to: CT angiography vs echocardiography for detection of cardiac thrombi in ischemic stroke: a systematic review and meta-analysis (Journal of Neurology, (2020), 267, 6, (1793-1801), 10.1007/s00415-020-09766-8)
No full textThe original version of this article unfortunately contained a mistake. In the author list, the first and last names of two authors, S. Matthijs Boekholdt and R. Nils Planken, were tagged incorrectly. Therefore, author names are abbreviated wrongly in Springerlink. The first and last names should be as follows: First name: S. Matthijs Last name: Boekholdt First name: R. Nils Last name: Planken
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