Visual world studies of conversational perspective taking: similar findings, diverging interpretations

Visual-world eyetracking greatly expanded the potential for insight into how listeners access and use common ground during situated language comprehension. Past reviews of visual world studies on perspective taking have largely taken the diverging findings of the various studies at face value, and attributed these apparently different findings to differences in the extent to which the paradigms used by different labs afford collaborative interaction. Researchers are asking questions about perspective taking of an increasingly nuanced and sophisticated nature, a clear indicator of progress. But this research has the potential not only to improve our understanding of conversational perspective taking. Grappling with problems of data interpretation in such a complex domain has the unique potential to drive visual world researchers to a deeper understanding of how to best map visual world data onto psycholinguistic theory. I will argue against this interactional affordances explanation, on two counts. First, it implies that interactivity affects the overall ability to form common ground, and thus provides no straightforward explanation of why, within a single noninteractive study, common ground can have very large effects on some aspects of processing (referential anticipation) while having negligible effects on others (lexical processing). Second, and more importantly, the explanation accepts the divergence in published findings at face value. However, a closer look at several key studies shows that the divergences are more likely to reflect inconsistent practices of analysis and interpretation that have been applied to an underlying body of data that is, in fact, surprisingly consistent. The diverging interpretations, I will argue, are the result of differences in the handling of anticipatory baseline effects (ABEs) in the analysis of visual world data. ABEs arise in perspective-taking studies because listeners have earlier access to constraining information about who knows what than they have to referential speech, and thus can already show biases in visual attention even before the processing of any referential speech has begun. To be sure, these ABEs clearly indicate early access to common ground; however, access does not imply integration, since it is possible that this information is not used later to modulate the processing of incoming speech. Failing to account for these biases using statistical or experimental controls leads to over-optimistic assessments of listeners’ ability to integrate this information with incoming speech. I will show that several key studies with varying degrees of interactional affordances all show similar temporal profiles of common ground use during the interpretive process: early anticipatory effects, followed by bottom-up effects of lexical processing that are not modulated by common ground, followed (optionally) by further late effects that are likely to be post-lexical. Furthermore, this temporal profile for common ground radically differs from the profile of contextual effects related to verb semantics. Together, these findings are consistent with the proposal that lexical processes are encapsulated from common ground, but cannot be straightforwardly accounted for by probabilistic constraint-based approaches

Principles of Multimedia News Systems for Business Applications

In the past few years considerable demand for business oriented multimedia information systems has developed. A multimedia information system is one that can create, import, integrate, store, retrieve, edit, and delete two or more types of media materials in digital form, such as audio, image, full-motion video, and text information. Multimedia information systems play a central role in many business activities. They represent a very special class complex computing systems. This paper surveys a special type of multimedia information systems: multimedia news systems. Multimedia news systems deal with architectures to manage complex multimedia news databases, online presentation and distribution services or the integration of several existing services to meta-services using intelligent news retrieval engines. The leading presentation platform in multimedia news presentation is news networks providing television services and Internet content distribution. The primary focus is on advanced multimedia news systems infrastructure, document standards, application architecture and principles for multimedia news on the Web that suggest long-term trends in this increasingly important area.multimedia, information systems, business applications

SCREEN: Learning a Flat Syntactic and Semantic Spoken Language Analysis Using Artificial Neural Networks

In this paper, we describe a so-called screening approach for learning robust processing of spontaneously spoken language. A screening approach is a flat analysis which uses shallow sequences of category representations for analyzing an utterance at various syntactic, semantic and dialog levels. Rather than using a deeply structured symbolic analysis, we use a flat connectionist analysis. This screening approach aims at supporting speech and language processing by using (1) data-driven learning and (2) robustness of connectionist networks. In order to test this approach, we have developed the SCREEN system which is based on this new robust, learned and flat analysis. In this paper, we focus on a detailed description of SCREEN's architecture, the flat syntactic and semantic analysis, the interaction with a speech recognizer, and a detailed evaluation analysis of the robustness under the influence of noisy or incomplete input. The main result of this paper is that flat representations allow more robust processing of spontaneous spoken language than deeply structured representations. In particular, we show how the fault-tolerance and learning capability of connectionist networks can support a flat analysis for providing more robust spoken-language processing within an overall hybrid symbolic/connectionist framework.Comment: 51 pages, Postscript. To be published in Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research 6(1), 199

A Corpus Stylistic Analysis of Speech and Thought Presentation in James Joyce’s Dubliners

The present article attempts to analyze the interaction between categories of speech and thought in James Joyce’s Dubliners quantitatively and qualitatively by applying Leech and Short Model (1981/2007). Excerpts of 2000-word length have been randomly selected and manually tagged to have the accurate annotation keeping in mind the contextual potential to recognize discourse categories in Joyce fiction and then corpus software AntConc (Laurence Anthony 2018) was used to get quantitative results. The present study is grounded within three separate but interrelated disciplines: Stylistics, Discourse Analysis, and Narratology. It is difficult to imagine an example of a narrative that does not contain a reference to or a quotation of someone’s speech or thoughts. To a large extent, the way we perceive a story depends upon the ways discourse is presented. This is something hard to demarcate the boundaries between them as the various modes have the potential to slip into one another. Special emphasis is given to variations between the three modes as well as to the instances of ambiguity created by their interplay. The article also compares findings with those described in Semino and Short (2004) for their corpus of 20th-century narrative fiction. Keywords:Corpus Stylistics, speech presentation, thought presentation, Leech and Short Model DOI: 10.7176/JLLL/81-05 Publication date:August 31st 202

Content warehouses

Nowadays, content management systems are an established technology. Based on the experiences from several application scenarios we discuss the points of contact between content management systems and other disciplines of information systems engineering like data warehouses, data mining, and data integration. We derive a system architecture called "content warehouse" that integrates these technologies and defines a more general and more sophisticated view on content management. As an example, a system for the collection, maintenance, and evaluation of biological content like survey data or multimedia resources is shown as a case study

Emerging insights from the evolving framework of structural abstraction

Only recently ‘abstraction from objects’ has attracted attention in the literature as a form of abstraction that has the potential to take account of the complexity of students’ knowing and learning processes compatible with their strategy of giving meaning. This paper draws attention to several emerging insights from the evolving framework of structural abstraction in students’ knowing and learning of the limit concept of a sequence. Particular ideas are accentuated that we need to understand from a theoretical point of view since they reveal a new way of understanding knowing and learning advanced mathematical concepts

Book Reviews

Book Reviews Judy Halden-Sullivan - Evolution and Criticism Julie J. Nichols - Boyd, Brian. On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction. Cambridge: Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 2009. Julie J. Nichols - Zunshine, Lisa. Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006 Mary Pettice - Dutton, Denis. The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution. 2nd edition. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010. Print