Comparative relation generative model

Singapore National Research Foundatio

Syntactic reconstruction in Indo-European : the state of the art

Interest in syntactic reconstruction was implicit in the work of the founding fathers of the Comparative Method, including Franz Bopp and his contemporaries. The Neo-Grammarians took a more active interest in syntactic issues, concentrating especially on comparative descriptive syntax. In the 20th century, typologically-inspired research gave rise to several reconstructions of neutral word order for Proto-Indo-European. This work was met with severe criticism by Watkins (1976), which had the unfortunate effect that work on syntactic reconstruction reached a methodological impasse and was largely abandoned. However, the pioneering work of Hale (1987a), Garrett (1990) and Harris & Campbell (1995) showed that syntactic reconstruction could be carried out successfully. Currently, three different strands of work on syntactic reconstruction can be identified: i) the traditional Indo-Europeanists, ii) the generativists, and iii) the construction grammarians. The reconstructions of the two first strands are incomplete, either due to lack of formal representation, or due to the inability of the representational system to explicate the details of the form-meaning correspondences underlying any analysis of syntactic reconstruction. In contrast, Construction Grammar has at its disposal a full-fledged representational formalism where all aspects of grammar can be made explicit, hence allowing for the precise formulations of form-meaning correspondences needed to carry out a complete reconstruction. This is exemplified in the present paper with a reconstruction of grammatical relations for Proto-Germanic, involving a set of argument structure constructions and the subject tests applicable in the grammar of the proto-stage

Entrepreneurial experience and the innovativeness of serial entrepreneurs

Purpose - This paper examines the effects of past entrepreneurial experience on the reported innovativeness of serial entrepreneurs’ subsequent ventures. Building on insights from the generative entrepreneurial learning process and from cognition theories, we propose that regardless of the type of entrepreneurial experience, positive or negative, such experience enriches the cognitive schemas of serial entrepreneurs leading them to greater reported innovativeness. Knowing this will expand our knowledge of entrepreneurial career development. Design/Methodology/approach - The proposed hypotheses are tested using Heckman regression models relating past entrepreneurial experience, current business ownership and reported innovativeness of current businesses on a unique sample drawn from a Catalan adult population survey. The data on the past entrepreneurial experience of the Catalan adult population were collected specifically for the purpose of this study. Findings - Results reveal that practical experience is an essential prerequisite for entrepreneurial learning, and even negative entrepreneurial experience may induce generative entrepreneurial learning suitable for subsequent outperforming ventures for the psychologically strong who have managed to learn from their experience. Implications - This paper offers insights on how the nature of the past entrepreneurial activity influences future venturing decisions. This study contributes to the academic debate on whether increased entrepreneurial experience and generative learning processes best explain serial entrepreneurial behaviors. Originality/Value - The paper further explores the influence of previous entrepreneurial experience on current entrepreneurial activity by analyzing the relationship between serial entrepreneurship and reported innovativeness.Preprin

Expediting TTS Synthesis with Adversarial Vocoding

Recent approaches in text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis employ neural network strategies to vocode perceptually-informed spectrogram representations directly into listenable waveforms. Such vocoding procedures create a computational bottleneck in modern TTS pipelines. We propose an alternative approach which utilizes generative adversarial networks (GANs) to learn mappings from perceptually-informed spectrograms to simple magnitude spectrograms which can be heuristically vocoded. Through a user study, we show that our approach significantly outperforms na\"ive vocoding strategies while being hundreds of times faster than neural network vocoders used in state-of-the-art TTS systems. We also show that our method can be used to achieve state-of-the-art results in unsupervised synthesis of individual words of speech.Comment: Published as a conference paper at INTERSPEECH 201

Structural Agnostic Modeling: Adversarial Learning of Causal Graphs

A new causal discovery method, Structural Agnostic Modeling (SAM), is presented in this paper. Leveraging both conditional independencies and distributional asymmetries in the data, SAM aims at recovering full causal models from continuous observational data along a multivariate non-parametric setting. The approach is based on a game between $d$ players estimating each variable distribution conditionally to the others as a neural net, and an adversary aimed at discriminating the overall joint conditional distribution, and that of the original data. An original learning criterion combining distribution estimation, sparsity and acyclicity constraints is used to enforce the end-to-end optimization of the graph structure and parameters through stochastic gradient descent. Besides the theoretical analysis of the approach in the large sample limit, SAM is extensively experimentally validated on synthetic and real data

Architectural authorship in generative design

The emergence of evolutionary digital design methods, relying on the creative generation of novel forms, has transformed the design process altogether and consequently the role of the architect. These methods are more than the means to aid and enhance the design process or to perfect the representation of finite architectural projects. The architectural design philosophy is gradually transcending to a hybrid of art, engineering, computer programming and biology. Within this framework, the emergence of designs relies on the architect- machine interaction and the authorship that each of the two shares. This work aims to explore the changes within the design process and to define the authorial control of a new breed of architects- programmers and architects-users on architecture and its design representation. For the investigation of these problems, this thesis is to be based on an experiment conducted by the author in order to test the interaction of architects with different digital design methods and their authorial control over the final product. Eventually, the results will be compared and evaluated in relation to the theoretic views. Ultimately, the architect will establish his authorial role