Investigating Semantic Effects in Adjective-Noun Conceptual Combination

Conceptual combination is an active meaning construction process involved in the production and comprehension of complex concepts (e.g., SLEEP TREE, STONY FACE). Distributional and schema-based theories of conceptual combination have proposed various cognitive mechanisms with a primary focus on the processing of noun-noun complex concepts (e.g., SLEEP TREE). The manipulation of variables related to the constituent (e.g., relational frequency) and phrase (e.g., typicality) composition has provided insightful advances into the conceptual representation and processing of complex concepts. Within this context, semantic variables related to semantic richness and concreteness of complex concepts have not been examined in the conceptual combination literature despite having been thoroughly investigated with respect to the processing of simple concepts. The primary objective of the current study is to investigate the processing of adjective-noun combinations (e.g., STONY FACE) by manipulating semantic variables related to the constituent (i.e., semantic neighbourhood density or SND) and phrase (e.g., concreteness) structure. The adjective-noun stimulus set was constructed with participant ratings using a novel quantitative measure to capture a varying degree of novelty (Experiment 1a) and concreteness (Experiment 1b). In the remaining experiments, the processing of adjective-noun combinations was examined with methodology capturing online processing with tasks of differential semantic engagement (Experiments 2-4) as well as an offline interpretation task (Experiment 5). Collectively, the findings of the current study inform our understanding of the conceptual representation and comprehension of adjective-noun phrases. The results of the online processing experiments demonstrated orthographic and semantic effects, which were observed in a graded fashion based on the level of semantic processing the task required. In the shallowest double lexical decision task with non-pronounceable non-words (Experiment 2), only orthographic effects pertaining to the visual word form of adjective-noun phrases were found (i.e., combined letter length, mean orthographic frequency). In Experiment 3, where non-words were pronounceable and required a deeper level of semantic processing compared to Experiment 2, a partial meaningfulness effect was observed, as high meaningful adjective-noun pairs had faster response latencies compared to low meaningful adjective-noun pairs, though no differences were observed for the intermediate meaningful group. A concreteness effect, in which concrete word pairs are processed faster relative to abstract word pairs, was also observed in Experiment 3, particularly for low meaningful adjective-noun phrases. Complete main effects of meaningfulness and concreteness were observed in Experiment 4, the deepest semantic processing task that required participants to make judgments about whether adjective-noun pairs made sense as a pair, essentially recruiting conceptual combination under pressured time constraints. SND effects were also prominent in Experiment 4 and yielded asymmetrical modifier and noun effects based on the meaningfulness and concreteness of the phrase. In Experiment 5, participants were asked to provide an explicit interpretation of novel (low meaningful) adjective-noun phrases, and four themes of interpretation types were identified, including slot-filling, noun elaboration, abstraction, and adjective-reversal. The proportion of unique interpretations and interpretation types differed based on the semantic composition of the adjective-noun phrases. The results were taken as further support for language-based models of conceptual representations, based on the SND effects observed in Experiment 4 and 5, as SND is a quantitative variable derived from a language-based co-occurrence model (Durda & Buchanan, 2008). Kintsch’s (2000) computational model of constructing sentence meaning was applied as a mechanism of constructing meaning for adjective-noun phrases using Experiment 4 and 5 findings, based on previous results in adjective-noun metaphors (Al-Azary et al., 2021). This model can account for a variety of points made by other theorists of conceptual combination, including recruitment in both familiar and novel phrases, an important role of the modifier, an interaction between modifier and noun constituents, competition among different potential processing routes, and recruitment of prior background knowledge

The Sustainability of Agro-Food and Natural Resource Systems in the Mediterranean Basin

Agriculture; Food Science; Environmental Science and Engineerin

Safe Operation of Nuclear Power Plants - Is Safety Culture an Adequate Management Method?

One of the characteristics of a good safety culture is a definable commitment to the improvement of safety behaviours and attitudes at all organisational levels. A second characteristic of an organisation with excellent safety culture is free and open communication. The general understanding has been that safety culture is a part of organisation culture. In addition to safety culture thinking, proactive programmes and displays of proactive work to improve safety are required. This work needs to include, at a minimum, actions aiming at reducing human errors, the development of human error prevention tools, improvements in training, and the development of working methods and the organisation’s activities. Safety depends not only on the technical systems, but also on the people and the organisation. There is a need for better methods and tools for organisational assessment and development. Today there is universal acceptance of the significant impact that management and organisational factors have over the safety significance of complex industrial installations such as nuclear power plants. Many events with significant economic and public impact had causes that have been traced to management deficiencies. The objective of this study is development of new methods to increase safety of nuclear power plant operation. The research has been limited to commercial nuclear power plants that are intended for electrical power generation in Finland. Their production activities, especially operation and maintenance, are primarily reviewed from a safety point of view, as well as human performance and organisational factors perspective. This defines the scope and focus of the study. The research includes studies related to knowledge management and tacit knowledge in the project management context and specific studies related to transfer of tacit knowledge in the maintenance organization and transfer of tacit knowledge between workers of old generation and young generation. The empirical results of the research are presented in research papers which are enclosed in this thesis

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

Proceedings / 6th International Symposium of Industrial Engineering - SIE 2015, 24th-25th September, 2015, Belgrade

editors Vesna Spasojević-Brkić, Mirjana Misita, Dragan D. Milanovi