1,720,978 research outputs found
Event types in the mind and in the corpus
No full textEvent types (ET) have received consid- erable attention in formal semantics, but their importance in experimental linguis- tics has developed only recently. The aim of this work is to compare the perfor- mance of human annotators and corpus- based models in ET classification of Ital- ian verb
Un modello stocastico della classificazione azionale
No full textIl fatto che uno stesso verbo possa avere valori azionali diversi a seconda del suo contesto linguistico solleva il problema di come modellare la complessa interazione dei fattori costituivi dell’Aktionsart. Per nessuna classe azionale sembra possibile selezionare un insieme di tratti la cui presenza in un contesto sia congiuntamente necessaria e sufficiente a garantire che l’evento venga interpretato come appartenente a quella particolare classe. Inoltre, gli stessi tipi azionali non si presentano come entità monolitiche, bensì come categorie che contengono rappresentanti verbali prototipici resistenti a variazioni contestuali, accanto invece a verbi che più facilmente danno luogo a fenomeni di polisemia a livello azionale. L’ipotesi di ricerca che esploriamo in questo lavoro è che l’interpretazione del valore azionale di un verbo in contesto possa essere modellata come il risultato di un complesso processo di integrazione di vincoli morfologici, sintattici e semantici di natura intrinsecamente probabilistica. Il peso relativo dei diversi vincoli viene stimato attraverso un algoritmo di apprendimento automatico basato sul principio della “massimizzazione dell’entropia”, che registra le correlazioni tra le classi azionali con diversi tratti del contesto linguistico dei verbi estratti da un corpus annotato
Priming effects on event types classication: Effects of word and picture stimuli
No full textEvent types (ET) have been widely addressed in linguistic literature, but few studies have dealt with the questions of how they are represented, retrieved and processed in the mental lexicon. We report two experiments in which ET categories were found to give rise to semantic priming effects, both with word and picture stimuli. These effects are argued to provide empirical correlates for ET categories in the mental lexicon not only at the lexical level but also at a deeper conceptual level
Computational Models of Event Type Classification in Context
No full textVerb lexical semantic properties are only one of the factors that contribute to the determination of the event type expressed by a sentence, which is instead the result of a complex interplay between the verb meaning and its linguistic context. We report on two computational models for the automatic identification of event type in Italian. Both models use linguistically-motivated features extracted from Italian corpora. The main goal of our experiments is to evaluate the contribution of different types of linguistic indicators to identify the event type of a sentence, as well as to model various cases of context-driven event type shift. In the first model, event type identification has been modelled as a supervised classification task, performed with Maximum Entropy classifiers. In the second model, Self-Organizing Maps have been used to define and identify event types in an unsupervised way. The interaction of various contextual factors in determining the event type expressed by a sentence makes event type identification a highly challenging task. Computational models can help us to shed new light on the real structure of event type classes as well as to gain a better understanding of context-driven semantic shifts
Logical Metonymy Resolution in a Words-as-Cues Framework: Evidence From Self-Paced Reading and Probe Recognition
No full textLogical metonymy resolution (begin a book -> begin reading a book or begin writing a book) has traditionally been explained either through complex lexical entries (qualia structures) or through the integration of the implicit event via post-lexical access to world knowledge. We propose that recent work within the words-as-cues paradigm can provide a more dynamic model of logical metonymy, accounting for early and dynamic integration of complex event information depending on previous contextual cues (agent and patient). We first present a self-paced reading experiment on German subordinate sentences, where metonymic sentences and their paraphrased version differ only in the presence or absence of the clause-final target verb (Der Konditor begann die Glasur -> Der Konditor begann, die Glasur aufzutragen /The baker began the icing -> The baker began spreading the icing ). Longer reading times at the target verb position in a high-typicality condition (baker + icing -> spread) compared to a low-typicality (but still plausible) condition (child + icing -> spread) suggest that we make use of knowledge activated by lexical cues to build expectations about events. The early and dynamic integration of event knowledge in metonymy interpretation is bolstered by further evidence from a second experiment using the probe recognition paradigm. Presenting covert events as probes following a high-typicality or a low-typicality metonymic sentence (Der Konditor begann die Glasur -> AUFTRAGEN /The baker began the icing -> SPREAD), we obtain an analogous effect of typicality at 100 ms interstimulus interval
The Curious Case of Metonymic Verbs: A Distributional Characterization
Full text linkLogical metonymy combines an event-selecting verb with an entity-denoting noun (e.g.,The writer began the novel), triggering a covert event interpretation (e.g., reading, writing). Experimental investigations of logical metonymy must assume a binary distinction between metonymic (i.e. event-selecting) verbs and non-metonymic verbs to establish a control condition. However, this binary distinction (whether a verb is metonymic or not) is mostly made on intuitive grounds, which introduces a potential confounding factor.
We describe a corpus-based approach which characterizes verbs in terms of their behavior at the syntax-semantics interface. The model assesses the extent to which transitive verbs prefer event-denoting objects over entity-denoting objects. We then test this “eventhood” measure on
psycholinguistic datasets, showing that it can distinguish not only metonymic from non-metonymic
verbs, but that it can also capture more fine-grained distinctions among different classes of metonymic
verbs, putting such distinctions into a new graded perspective
Fitting, Not Clashing! A Distributional Semantic Model of Logical Metonymy
Full text linkLogical metonymy interpretation (e.g. begin the book ->writing) has received wide attention in linguistics. Experimental results have shown higher processing costs for metonymic conditions compared with non-metonymic ones (
read the book). According to a widely held interpretation, it is
the type clash between the event-selecting verb and the entity-denoting object (begin the book) that triggers coercion mechanisms and leads to additional processing effort. We propose an alternative explanation and argue that the extra processing effort is an effect of thematic fit. This is a more
economical hypothesis that does not need to postulate a separate type clash mechanism: entity-denoting objects simply have a low fit as objects of event-selecting verbs. We test linguistic datasets from psycholinguistic experiments and find that a structured distributional model of thematic fit,
which does not encode any explicit argument type information, is able to replicate all significant experimental findings. This result provides evidence for a graded account of coercion phenomena in which thematic fit accounts for both the trigger of the coercion and the retrieval of the covert even
Inferring Covert Events in Logical Metonymies: a Probe Recognition Experiment
No full textIt has been widely acknowledged that the interpretation of log- ical metonymies involves the interpretation of covert events (begin the book → reading / writing). Whether this implicit content is part of our lexicon or rather derives from general pragmatic inference, it is currently subject of debate. We present results from a probe recognition experiment, providing novel evidence in support of early metonymy processing, consistent with the hypothesis that covert events are retrieved from knowledge of typical events activated by lexical items
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
- …
