Usage Effects on the Cognitive Routinization of Chinese Resultative Verbs

The present study adopts a corpus-oriented usage-based approach to the grammar of Chinese resultative verbs. Zooming in on a specific class of V-kai constructions, this paper aims to elucidate the effect of frequency in actual usage events on shaping the linguistic representations of resultative verbs. Specifically, it will be argued that while high token frequency results in more lexicalized V-kai complex verbs, high type frequency gives rise to more schematized V-kai constructions. The routinized patterns pertinent to V-kai resultative verbs varying in their extent of specificity and generality accordingly serve as a representative illustration of the continuum between lexicon and grammar that characterizes a usage-based conception of language

Seeing What You're Told: Sentence-Guided Activity Recognition In Video

We present a system that demonstrates how the compositional structure of events, in concert with the compositional structure of language, can interplay with the underlying focusing mechanisms in video action recognition, thereby providing a medium, not only for top-down and bottom-up integration, but also for multi-modal integration between vision and language. We show how the roles played by participants (nouns), their characteristics (adjectives), the actions performed (verbs), the manner of such actions (adverbs), and changing spatial relations between participants (prepositions) in the form of whole sentential descriptions mediated by a grammar, guides the activity-recognition process. Further, the utility and expressiveness of our framework is demonstrated by performing three separate tasks in the domain of multi-activity videos: sentence-guided focus of attention, generation of sentential descriptions of video, and query-based video search, simply by leveraging the framework in different manners.Comment: To appear in CVPR 201